The Destructive Element

THE DESTRUCTIVE ELEMENT

By the Same Author

POBMS

VIENNA

THE DESTRUCTIVE ELEMENT

A Study of Modern Writers
and Beliefs

STEPHEN SPENDER

JONATHAN CAPE
THIRTY BEDFORD SQUARE
LONDON

FIRST PUBLISHSD 1935

JONATHAN CAPE LTD., 30 BEDFORD SQUARE, LONDON
AND 91 WELLINGTON STREET WEST, TORONTO

PRINTED IN OREAT BRITAIN BY J. AND J. GRAY, EDINBURGH
PAPER MADE BY JOHN DICKINSON AND CO. LTD.
BOUND BY A. W. BAIN AND CO. LTD.

CO

TENTS

PAbT ONE

HENRY JAMES

CHAPTFK PAGE

INTRODUCTION I I

I. THE SCHOOL OF EXPERIENCE IN THE EARLY

NOVELS OF HENRY JAMES 2^

II. LIFE AS ART AND ART AS LIFE 47

III. THE UNCONSCIOUS S’]

IV. THE IVORY TOWER AND THE SENSE OF THE

PAST 99

PART TWO

THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

V. A BRIDGE I 13

VI. YEATS AS A REALIST I I ^

VII. T. S. ELIOT IN HIS POETRY I 32

VIII. T. S. ELIOT IN HIS CRITICISM I 53

IX. NOTES ON D. H. LAWRENCE I 76

PART THREE

IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

X. HENRY JAMES AND THE CONTEMPORARY SUB-
JECT

5

189

6

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PA

XI. THE GREAT WITHOUT 20

XII. POETRY AND PITY 21

XIII. WRITERS AND MANIFESTOS 22

XIV. UPWARD, KAFKA AND VAN DER POST 2 2

XV. THE AIRMAN, POLITICS AND PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 2 ^

EPILOGUE 27

INDEX 28

TO ROSAMOND AND WOGAN

NOTE

I AM particularly indebted to Miss Theodora Bosanquet,
Lady Ottoline Morrell, Miss Janet Adam Smith and Mr.
Herbert Read for their assistance in making it possible
for me to write the first part of this book, about Henry
James. My thanks are also due to Mr. T. S. Eliot, who
drew my attention to the importance of Hawthorne as an
influence on James; to Mr. Lincoln Kirstein, the editor
of Hound and Horn^ who gave me some details about
James’s illness; to my uncle, Mr. J. A. Spender;
to Miss W. E. Paine for making the index; and to
Mr. Isaiah Berlin and Mr. William Plomer for helping
me with the proofs.

Where I have used quotations that have to my know-
ledge been used by other commentators, I have drawn
attention to both sources. This does not mean that I am
quoting from someone else’s quotation, but that I am
aware that my quotation has been used previously.

When my use of material is most controversial, as in the
essays on Wyndham Lewis and Max Eastman, I have given
full references. I have not weighed down the essays on
James with such margination, because it is scarcely likely
that the reader will want to turn to my exact quotation,
and the references are sufficiently indicated in the text.
Also, I have used the earlier edition of Roderick Hudson,
not the revised version published in the Collected Edition.

Some extracts from these pages have appeared in The
Criterion, Hound and Horn, The London Mercury, and Lejt
Review. Acknowledgements are due to the editors of
periodicals; and also to Messrs. Macmillan, Cassell,
Seeker, Faber & Faber, Chatto & Windus, and The
Hogarth Press for permission to quote from books
published by them.

8

T>ART ONE

MEISTRY JAMES

INTRODUCTION

In this book I have taken Henry James as a great writer
who developed an inner world of his own through his art.
I have also tried to show that his attitude to our civilization
forced him to that development. The process had two
stages. The first was his conviction that European
society— and particularly English society— was decadent,
combined with his own despair of fulfilling any creative
or critical function in civilization as a whole. Secondly,
he discovered, in the strength of his own individuality,
immense resources of respect for the past and for civiliza-
tion; he fulfilled his capacity to live and watch and judge
by his own standards, to the utmost.

It is not only the characters he created that are special-
ized-all examples, as he willingly admitted, of the
‘special case’— it is also the institutions, rather than the
class, which he described. All the time he transforms his
material with a subtle and concealed anachronism. He
exploits the realistic tradition of the novel by making his
real, highly select subject matter, unreal on another plane;
his aristocrats, his millionaires, are given, in fact, an over-
dose of Power. The power, the social significance which
they possess, does not exist in the modern world, it is im-
bibed from history; from the cities of France, and from
Venice and Florence in particular.

On these lines I have defended James from the
generally accepted dismissals of him. If he is a snob, he
is a snob for this reason: that he is imposing on a de-
cadent aristocracy the greater tradition of the past. His
characters have the virtues of people who are living into
the past: an extreme sensibility; consideration for, and

12 HENRY JAMES

curiosity about, each other’s conduct; an aestheticism of
behaviour. In some ways their lives are a pastiche; but
the pastiche is an elaboration of traditional moral values :
of love and respect. The life that James is, on the surface,
describing, may be false; the life that he is all the time
inventing is true.

These considerations may put James in a different
light from that in which most readers see him. This
is a light which illumines several writers, of whom he
is the greatest. Take James, then, as the greatest of a
line who owe more to an un-English (a Celtic and a Con-
tinental) tradition than to the purely Anglo-Saxon one:
Joyce, Yeats, Ezra Pound and Eliot. These writers have
all fortified their works by creating some legend, or by
consciously going back into a tradition that seemed and
seems to be dying. They are all conscious of the present
as chaotic (though they are not all without their remedies),
and of the past as an altogether more solid ground.

I. A. Richards, in his important essay Science and
Poetry^ adding a footnote to his pronouncement on The
JVaste Land (the full version of which appears in the
second edition of Principles of Literary Criticism), quotes
from Conrad: ‘In the destructive element immerse. That
is the way.’ T. S. Eliot, he implies, has thus immersed
himself. Since that essay was written, while one may
doubt whether T. S. Eliot’s immersion was total, one sees
also that others, whether or not they have decided to
have a dip, were immensely conscious of the destructive
element. One sees this in Pound’s Mauberley, in Yeats’s

‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned,’

INTRODUCTION 13

in James’s grand, final, epistolary gasp at the outbreak
of the war : ‘To have to take it all for what the treacherous
years were all the while really making for and meanings is
too tragic for any words.’

The idea for a book on James gradually resolved itself,
then, in my mind, into that of a book about modern
writers and beliefs, or unbeliefs; which turned again into
a picture of writers grouped round the ‘destructive
element,’ wondering whether or not to immerse them-
selves. But if one has eventually immersed himself,
there are also others who seem to be making a fine show
of emerging at the other side.

The difficulty of a book about contemporaries is that
one is dealing in a literature of few accepted values. At
best one can offer opinions, or one can try to prove that
one living writer is, for certain reasons, better than
another. At worst such criticism degenerates into a kind
of bookmaking, or stockbroking. Certain living critics
have made wide reputations as bookies, brokers or dic-
tators. For the step from the literary tipster to the Book
Society dictator is not wide. I have read, for example, in
a Tasteful study of contemporary poets, a carefully
reasoned chapter explaining why the critic believes that
Walter de la Mare is unlikely to develop further in his
poetry; another chapter explaining which, exactly, are
the dozen or so poems by Thomas Hardy that are worth
reading. This seems to me not criticism, but, strictly,
impertinence. A living writer as great as de la Mare
does not decline in accordance with rules laid down by
donnish minds : at most it is a bet with various odds, long
or short, to say of any good writer that he will write no
more good poetry. A dead writer of genius had reason
for writing in the way he chose, and the ‘common reader’
is at liberty to pick his way among Hardy’s poems, per-

14 HENRY JAMES

haps guided by the critic, but not dictated to by him.
Imp ertinent criti cis m means, th a t the critic i s projecting
on to w riting som e fa ntasy of^his own ^to Eb^ poems
should^ e written.

My aim, then, in the arrangement of this book, is to
establish my one very great writer as my chief value, and
then allow the others to fall into their places. The great
writer is James : he is firm enough to stand strongly as a
central figure. The next problem is to make a bridge
between James and the younger writers who are now our
immediate contemporaries. I attempt this in the second
section. Yeats and Eliot are both traditionalists; they are
individualist writers, but they are also extremely aware of
contemporary problems. In his latest poetry Yeats has
revolutionized his style; his power of observation seems to
have undergone the same kind of change as one finds in
James’s last, unfinished, novel. The Ivory Tower. Lawrence,
on the other hand, compared with these other writers, is a
kind of traveller to uncharted lands. As a psychologist, in
his poems, and in Fantasia oj the Unconscious^ he is in many
ways ahead of all our contemporaries. As a descriptive
writer he is unique and has no follower, so that his achieve-
ment takes us beyond the writers of my last section.

All these writers seem to me, faced by the destructive
ele ment; that is, by the experience of a n all-per vading
Preset, which is aTworld without belief.^ This situation is
accurately described hiy 1. ATTlichards, who finds in
The Waste Land the expression of the predicament of a
generation. This account of the poem is perhaps too
final; but the predicament seems to me real, so that I. A.
Richards’s pronouncement may, in a sense, be taken as
complementary to T. S. Eliot’s poem. The Waste Land
released the comment that really applied and applies to
most of the serious literature of this century. We may take

INTRODUCTION

15

the pronouncement as a focal point from which diverge
rays towards the past and the future. On the one hand
there are the writers who search for some unifying belief in
the past or in some personal legend, on the other, those
who (like characters in Chekhov’s plays) look forward to a
world of new beliefs in the future. Both of these attitudes
are explained by the consciousness of a void in the present.

This book is not written in defence of any particular
set of beliefs, because I myself have adopted them. What
interests me here is what writers write about, the subjects
of literature to-day. So that in the last section I am not
defending the young writers from the old writers, I am
defending what is, in the widest sense, the political or
political-moral subject in writing. To me the lesson of
writers like James, Yeats, Eliot and Lawrence is, that they
are all approaching in different ways, and with varying
success, the same political subject. Their task may some-
times seem impossible, for in the chaos of unbelief the
time lacks, or has seemed to lack, all moral consistency.
Nevertheless, certain statements have been made. I have
tried to elucidate the statements in The Golden Bowl and
The Wings 0/ the Dove. The statements in The Waste
Land and in some later poems of Yeats are far barer. In
the case of Lawrence, as the various biographies go to show,
a bare account of his life would be a valuable illustrative
account of the moral life of our time. His own books are,
indeed, descriptions of his experience; and the writing
is so inextricably bound up with the value he set on living,
that it seems a part of the experience; it does not seem at
all cut off from his life. In a word, what I want to indicate
in the work of all these writers is what James called the
‘Figure in the Carpet’; which is the ‘organ of life’. And the
organ of life, which is the moral life of human beings, is the
subject, the consistent pattern, through all of these books.

i6 HENRY JAMES

After I have said all this, the fact remains that the
main difficulty of these writers was a technical one. I
have described the process by which James’s art was
driven inwards; how in order to write about his political-
moral subject he was compelled to adopt a technique
which deprived him of a large audience. Lawrence also
was hampered by the ‘realistic* tradition of the English
novel. Only at the end of his life in The Man Who Died
did he attain the form which was most suited to his
subject; a form like that of a parable, in which he was able
to combine his brilliant gift of visual description with
the peculiar imagery of prose poems, which, in an ordinary
novel like The Plumed Serpent seems out of place and
almost grotesque. Yeats, too, only in his last work has
attained a lyrical form suited to his contemporary subject;
and, as yet, in his longer work he has been compelled
always to return to the romantic subject, where the
background of a personal legend gives his work a unity
which is lacking in the unbelief of the present time.
Eliot’s struggles with Tradition involve him in an
attempt to solve technical difficulties in his own poetry;
to write a poetry which represents the modern moral life,
and which is yet not isolated from tradition.

My approach to writers in this book becomes, in a way,
progressively and deliberately more and more superficial. I
try to explain the technical development of James; how he
revolutionized the method of presentation in the novel;
altering the emphasis from the scene to that intellectual
and imaginative activity which leads to the scene, so that
his scenes are symptoms, not causes; always anti-climaxes,
not climaxes, in the sense that any explosion, any break-
down of nervously accumulating forces is anti-climatic.
It is necessary to relate this to his actual view of life, to
the figure in the carpet. In Yeats I see a fundamental

INTRODUCTION

17

division of the realist, from the practical politician and
mystic, the reporter attending stances. I see Eliot as
an extremely isolated artist of great sensibility, whose
work at one moment, in The Waste Land, achieved a
wide objectivity; but his poetry narrows on the one side
back to Prufrock, on the other side forwards to Ash
Wednesday and Marina. To say this is not necessarily to
attack it, because it was an extremely isolated, a deaf, and
a neurotic sensibility that produced the great Quartets of
Beethoven’s last period. Eliot’s criticism I argue with,
because I regard it as an elaborate rationalization of his
position; an attempt to objectify his situation as a poet,
which simply exists, and does not need defending. The
defence involves him in making statements which call for
discussion. I end this section with some notes about
D. H. Lawrence. This essay is necessarily incomplete,
because I do not wish to repeat things which have been
said better by others; and a great deal has been said
about Lawrence. This whole middle section is an attempt
to explain the position of certain writers, without becoming
involved in technical discussions.

The last section is an argument. All these writers
I have been discussing have really the same moral-
political subject as the centre of their work. The attitude
may be centrifugal as in James, because James believed
that the only values which mattered at all were those
cultivated by individuals who had escaped from the general
decadence of Europe. But, before everything else, the
individual must be agonizedly aware of his isolated
situation; nor is he to be selfish; he is still occupied in
building up the little nucleus of a real civilization possible
for himself, and for others possessing the same awareness
as himself.

More recently, however, the situation seems to have

i8 HENRY JAMES

profoundly altered, because the moral life of the in-
dividual has become comparatively insignificant. In times
of revolution or war there is a divorce between the kind
of morality that affects individuals and the morality of the
State, of politics. For example, in time of war the moral or
immoral purpose invented by the State is to beat the enemy,
and the usual taboos affecting individuals are almost sus-
pended. Those taboos which serve to make the individual
conform to a strict family code may become regarded as
almost ludicrous. In revolutionary times it is questions of
social justice, of liberty, of war or peace, of election, that
become really important. Questions of private morality, of
theft, of adultery, become almost insignificant; in private
life there remain few great saints, and absolutely no great
sinners. The old question of free will, of whether the
individual is free to choose between two courses of action
becomes superseded by another question: Is a society
able to determine the course of its history ?

Society is, of course, made up of individuals, and the
choice, if there is any, lies finally with individuals. But
there is a difference between public acts and private acts
of individuals. There is a difference between the man
who considers that he is a great and exciting sinner
because he leads a promiscuous sexual life, and the man
who decides not to live too promiscuously, because to do
so embarrasses and complicates his revolutionary activities.
To the second man the question of a morality in his
private life becomes a matter of convenience, whereas his
political conscience governs his actions.

In times of rest, of slow evolution and peace, society is
an image of the individual quietly living his life and
obeying the laws. In violent times the moral acts of the
individual seem quite unrelated to the immense social
changes going on all round him. He looks at civilization

INTRODUCTION 19

and does not see his own quiet image reflected there at
all, but the face of something fierce and threatening, that
may destroy him. It may seem foreign and yet resemble
his own face. He knows that if he is not to be destroyed,
he must somehow connect his life again with this political
life and influence it.

The subject of these great individualist writers, our con-
temporaries of the present and the recent past, was the
moral — or in my wide use of the word — the political life.
That is the subject of the most important art of our time.
I am trying to show that it must still remain the most
serious subject for our literature. The extraordinary
public events of the last few years, the war, revolutions,
the economic crisis, are bound eventually to become
absorbed into the tradition of literature; they are going
to be the Figure in the Carpet.

Here, in certain events, the war, the revolutions, is the
subject; after that, as I have shown in my other examples,
the immense difficulty of the technical problem begins.
But the technical problem will only be solved if we
realize that the moral subject exists. It is not true to say
that poetry is about nothing; poetry is about history, but
not history in the sense of school books; a history which
is the moral life, which is ‘always contemporary.’ And
the pattern, the technique, is the organ of life.

So that in this third section I find myself opposed to the
distinguished critic who says that art is or should be non-
moral and non-political, but external and satiric, as much
as I am bound also to oppose those who say that literature
should become an instrument of propaganda. What I am
asserting is that the greatest art is moral even when the
artist has no particular moral axe to grind. Conversely,
that having a particular moral or political axe to grind
does destroy art if the writer {a) suspends his own judge-

20 HENRY JAMES

ments and substitutes the system of judging established
by a political creed; (i>) assumes knowledge of men and
the future course of history, which he may passionately
believe, but which, as an artist, he simply hasn’t got.

I am committed then to a theory of communication:
that the poet is not dealing in purely aesthetic values, but
that he is communicating an experience of life which is
outside his own personal experience. He may com-
municate his own experience, yet he is not bounded by
that, but by his understanding. If I am answered with
theories of pure art, I would reply that pure poetry does
communicate a kind of experience, and that this is the
experience of a void. For the sense of a void is a very
important kind of experience. All theories of art for
art’s sake, and of pure art, are the attempt to state the
theory of a kind of art based on no political, religious o’*
moral creed. Certain symbolist poems succeed in being
‘pure,’ because they communicate an experience which
is really a void of experience, something static, lifeless
and immovable. But in order to achieve this they depend
on certain associations and sequences in our minds which
they deliberately set out to destroy. But unless these
sequences and associations existed, they would achieve
nothing. There could be no ‘free association’ if there
were not a tied association; there could be no Gertrude
Steinism if there were not a time sense. Such writing is
essentially a phase, a void between two worlds. It is, again,
the literature of the ‘destructive element.’

‘The old gang to be forgotten in the spring.

The hard bitch and the riding-master.

Stiff underground; deep in clear lake
The lolling bridegroom, beautiful, there.

^ W. H. Auden, Poems, No XVI (Second Edition).

INTRODUCTION

21

Lastly, I am not stating how writers should write, or
even what they should write about. That is their business,
not mine. I am only suggesting that the sufferings of
Henry James’s over-perceptive characters, in particular,
the sleepless and choking nights of Maggie Verver,
found expression in the physical suffering of the war.
Maggie was, as it were, haunted by the ghosts of the
future. James was a very great artist if only because
the suffering of his characters was not born of self-
pity; it was an intuition, and it was true. His artistic
creations have a kind of awareness which is deeper than
his own consciousness; they knew what the years were
all the while meaning. And we, in these later times, are
inundated by the meaning. It is the business of certain
writers not to escape it.

I

THE SCHOOL OF EXPERIENCE IN THE
EARLY NOVELS OF HENRY JAMES

Some writers, as they develop, move from what is ob-
served to what they invent. Others, by an inverse process,
begin with romantic inventions and end with observation.

For instance, Goethe is a writer who began with
romantic invention, and who at the end of his life, in such
poetry as the West-0 estlicher Divan^ revealed his sense of
the immediate reality of the outer world around him.
Yeats is another artist who has moved from the romantic
inventiveness of his youth to the acute human observation
of his old age. At the end of his life, in his very last work,
D. H. Lawrence broke away from direct autobiographical
observation and invented stories which are really fables.
Eliot, on the other hand, is an example of an artist who
has withdrawn more and more into the world of his own
inner experience; Joyce into a world of his own artistic
development. Henry James also went through the school
of observation when he was a young man, and found
himself more and more free to invent as he grew older.

I suggest that at some time in his life an artist has got
to come to grips with the objective, factual life around
him. He cannot spin indefinitely from himself unless he
learns how to establish contact with his audience by the
use of symbols which represent reality to his contem-
poraries. If he does not learn this lesson, he ceases to be
an artist, or he dies, like Keats and Shelley.

What is interesting is that if the artist moves from

23

24 HENRY JAMES

romantic inventiveness to observation of outer reality, the
romantic symbols of his first period will be used as
symbols for the newly discovered reality. We find this
in Yeats’s later poems. If, on the other hand, he begins
with observation, fragments of what is observed will be
used as symbols for presenting the inner life.

Thus James’s later books, even where they are least
realistic in their content, are islanded with imagery which
is derived from realistic observation; just as dreams, ex-
pressing the desires censored by our waking thought,
figure those desires in pictures which are actual to us.
For example, in The Golden Boivl the relationship between
Charlotte and the prince is in Maggie’s distressed mind
‘like some wonderful, beautiful, but outlandish pagoda,
a structure plated with hard, bright porcelain, coloured
and figured and adorned, at the overhanging eaves, with
silver bells that tinkled ever so charmingly, when stirred
by chance airs.’ This realistic picture of a collector’s
piece in her father’s house has become to Maggie a
symbol, at once terrible and beautiful, of her unhappy
situation.

Thus we find in his early books a museum full of the
symbols which were at first observed as conditions in real
life, and which, in the later books, were used as symbols
for different states of mind.

James was impressed by wealth and display of a kind
which even to-day impress intelligent and sensitive
Americans travelling to Europe, which, indeed, impress
Europeans themselves; by Venice, Rome, and all Italy,
Paris and the French landscape and towns. He hated
Germany. What overwhelmed him in Europe was the
sense of tradition; a Continental tradition which was not
only unknown to America, but which, in literature, was
foreign to the English language. The French tradition

THE SCHOOL OF EXPERIENCE 25

was not only what he saw with his eyes, but also Madame
Bovary, Balzac’s novels and the stories of Maupassant.
There were also the people he met: the aristocrats, and
the literary society of Paris. And his invitations to parties
at English country houses.

In his early work he is obviously rather overwhelmed
by his impressions. Parts of Roderick Hudson read like a
tourist guide to Rome. The American sometimes reads
like a guide through a forest of French family trees.

From the moment James observed Europe, it therefore
became certain that the most important symbols of his
work would be impressions forced on him by families of
ancient lineage, by the survivals of a great artistic tradition,
and by the leisure and the displayed self-expression of
wealthy people. The misery of the poor and struggling
served chiefly as a stage background to the magnificent
scenery and dramatic figures which immediately caught
his eye.

His view is therefore limited. He is writing, essen-
tially, as a foreigner. And, as one realizes, if one reads the
account of his father in A Small Boy and Others, he is
not even really an American. He was brought up to
despise everything in America, and he was fed on dreams
of Europe, so that his outlook was really, from his child-
hood, cosmopolitan. This explains still further his passion
for tradition.

He restores the balance in his ‘traveller’s’ picture of
Europe by a stroke of honesty amounting to genius, in
setting the American tourist right in the foreground of
his early novels. Until he had mastered his European
material, he made the central theme of his early novels
what he later termed the ‘International Situation.’ The
‘International Situation’ became a method of approach
which he abandoned when he wrote the series of novels

26 HENRY JAMES

and stories beginning with The Awkward Age. He
returned to it in his three great novels, The Wings of
the Dove, The Golden Bowl, and The Ambassadors. The
method is made clear in a letter which he wrote to his
brother William in 1888: T have not the least hesitation
in saying that I aspire to write in such a way that it would
be impossible to an outsider to say whether I am at a
given moment an American writing about England or
an Englishman writing about America (dealing as I do
with both countries), and far from being ashamed of such
an ambiguity I should be exceedingly proud of it, for it
would be highly civilized.’

Although James’s earlier books are much fuller of
descriptive writing and rapportage than the later books,
the angle of vision is limited in both. As an artist, James
came to realize the advantages of this limitation, and he
used his thematic material at its simplest; the most
limited theme is capable of the greatest development and
variation. In his later books, those descriptive passages,
which tended to sameness and repetition, were dropped,
and he concentrated on developing and making intricate
his themes.

In these books it is possible to see through the facade
of descriptive writing and external observation, not only
to the theme of the ‘International Situation’ which was
the first step in his development, but also to the motifs of
the later novels.

Roderick Hudson is the story of a young American
sculptor who is taken from his home in Boston by a rich
young man called Rowland Mallett, who hopes that the
influence of European art will give the fullest release to
his genius. The experiment ends disastrously; the effect
of Europe on Roderick is to destroy his creative gift and
to reveal his character as weak, egoistic and irresponsible.

THE SCHOOL OF EXPERIENCE

27

The relationship between Rowland and Roderick
provides the book’s greatest interest. It is the relationship
of the protector and the prot^g^ which recurs often in
James, and it is also the relationship between a person
who is an artist in his work and the person who is an
artist in life. If we view Rowland and Roderick as a split
personality, we have, indeed, an aspect of James himself;
because James combined in himself the person who,
like Rowland, was the spectator at the edge of life, always
refusing to enter into it, and the sculptural artist that
Roderick might have been. Roderick is a projection of
James’s worst fears about his own future as an artist.
James shows pretty clearly that his sympathy is with
Rowland, who does not participate in life, and that he
considers him even to be the better artist.

‘Without flattering myself,’ writes Rowland, ‘I may
say that I’m cursed with sympathy— I mean as an active
faculty, the last of fond follies, the last of my own.’
‘Sympathy as an active faculty’ is there in most of James’s
work. Where his scientific impartiality prevents him from
revealing any attitude to his characters, he will sometimes
flood them with doses of sympathy which are his nearest
approach to sentimentality, and which certainly amount
often to querulousness. We pour endless sympathy over
Milly in The Golden Bowl, over Maggie in The Wings of
the Dove.

Another effect of James’s so definitely siding with
Rowland is that the spectator, the person who does not
participate, the often feminine presence of a second
Henry James, is projected into most of the novels. In
Roderick Hudson there is a cousin of Rowland called
Cecilia to whom Rowland writes. So that Rowland has
his own sympathetic spectre— his other Rowland— whose
only business in life seems to be to watch his affairs. A

28 HENRY JAMES

similar r6le is played by Mrs. Tristram in The American^
by Maria Gostrey in The Ambassadors^ by Mrs. Assingham
in The Golden Bowl^ to mention only a few names; the list
is indeed formidable. These characters are all really
versions of Rowland; they all listen and talk and com-
ment, and do not act; they all represent, in his most
feminine aspect, Henry James himself. Quite apart from
their value as choruses to his drama, James was interested
in the conception of life without action. The Beast in the
Jungle is the study of a man in whose life nothing hap-
pens; it is all spent in waiting for the beast to spring. The
Altar of the Dead describes two people, typical Jamesian
spectators, whose eyes are turned always to death, because
the hero of the drama which they were watching has
died before them. And these characters are really studies
for Strether in The Ambassadors, who, in his epic six
months in Paris, learns of everything called ‘life’ that he
has missed in his fifty-five years.

James lived the life of one of his Rowlands or Mrs.
Tristrams. Until middle age he travelled in Europe,
living longest in England and Italy; such a life of leisured
and comfortable journeys to frequented and beautiful
cities or parts of the country, is, in the majority of cases,
the most uneventful life our society has to offer. If it
provides excitement, it provides excitement with the
least possible amount of friction. Shortly after he was
fifty, at Rye, he ‘settled down,’ which is the phrase we
use of ships when they are about slowly to sink. He was
always comfortably off. At one time he supplemented his
income with a certain amount of literary journalism for
high-class American periodicals. In politics, he was a
Liberal of the most respectable brand. He stayed in
country houses, went to dinner parties and entertained
his friends.

THE SCHOOL OF EXPERIENCE 29

The personal conflict to be detected in James’s early
work is a conflict between the desire to plunge too deeply
into experience and the prudent resolution (leading,
perhaps, to a certain prudishness) to remain a spectator.
In two of his early stories. The Passionate Pilgrim and
The Madonna of the Future^ the overwhelming eflfect of
Europe on American travellers is described. In both
stories the creative activity of their heroes is reduced
to torpor, because they are intoxicated by their sense of
the tradition.

The problem that faced James was to absorb the
tradition of Europe and the tradition of English and
French literature, without losing his own individuality as
an American, and in his work the virile influence of Haw-
thorne. He could choose between two kinds of isolation :
the isolation of a person so deeply involved in experiencing
the sensations of a world which is foreign to him, that he
fails strikingly to affirm himself as a part of its unity; that
was the isolation of Roderick Hudson. ‘The great and
characteristic point with him was the perfect separateness
of his sensibility. He never saw himself as part of a
whole; only as the clear-cut, sharp-edged, isolated in-
dividual, rejoicing or raging, as the case might be, but
needing in any case absolutely to affirm himself.’

The alternative which James chose was to be isolated
in the manner of absolutely refusing to be an actor in the
play which so impressed him. His belief was that by
understanding he might see himself as ‘part of a whole.’
For the purpose of understanding he was armed, not with
his brother William’s power of abstract thought, but his
own imaginative creative gift, and with ‘sympathy as an
active faculty.’

He was not interested in ‘men of action.’ In his early
work he was fascinated by the artistic temperament. At

30 HENRY JAMES

a later period he wrote stories about problems connected
with the creation of literature. What he was always
really aiming at was to create characters who were artists
in life.

Rowland, in Roderick Hudson, is not in any acknow-
ledged sense an artist. Yet his attitude to Roderick is
exactly that of an art critic to some ‘find.’ He is a sort of
art critic who writes home letters about Roderick.

There is a sudden exclamation from another character,
Christina, the exotically attractive temptress of Roderick,
which explains very clearly what was already James’s
artistic aim in creating character.

‘What, then, have you dreamed of?’ (asks Roderick).

‘A man whom I can have the luxury of respecting!’
cried the girl with a sudden flame. ‘A man whom I can
admire enough to make me know I’m doing it. I meet
one, as I’ve met more than one before, whom I fondly
believe to be cast in a bigger mould than most of the
vulgar human breed — to be large in character, great in
talent, strong in will. In such a man as that, I say, one’s
weary imagination at last may rest, or may wander if it
will, but with the sense of coming home again a greater
adventure than any other.’

Strether, in The Ambassadors, is a character answering
to Christina’s description. But the characters in whom
the imagination may most freely ‘rest and wander’ are
the women of the later novels, such as Maggie Verver and
Milly.

There are also flickers of what James would call a
‘fine moral agitation,’ an interest in the complexity of
social life, the light and shadow on its surface. ‘Very odd,
you may say, that at this time of day Rowland should still
be brooding over a girl of no brilliancy, of whom he had
had a bare glimpse two years before; very odd that an

THE SCHOOL OF EXPERIENCE 31

impression should have fixed itself so sharply under so few
applications of the die. It is of the very nature of such
impressions, however, to show a total never presented
by the mere sum of their constituent parts.’ The last
sentence has an air of self-importance which seems a
little irrelevant to the book. But it is relevant to
James’s later heroes, who are doomed for ever to be
reckoning up such ‘sums.’

All that Roderick represented, the element of violence
in James’s work, was a hard ghost to lay. We have to
reckon with the fact that, as always with great aestheticians,
there is a certain vulgarity in his work, and this vulgarity
found its expression in violence. It is vulgarity of a kind
that we never find in the work of coarser writers like
Fielding, Smollett and Lawrence, but which we always
are conscious of in writers like Flaubert, or Jane Austen,
or Wilde. The classic example of such vulgarity is The
Picture of Dorian Gray.

I do not think, as has often been maintained, that James
is vulgar because he was a snob. He understood that very
small section of European society which interested him,
far too well to be able to write any account of it which
was not, in effect, a crushing indictment. He may have
been ‘knocked off his perch’ by the drawing-rooms of the
aristocracy, but he nevertheless saw the crack in ‘The
Golden Bowl,’ and, indeed, went so far as to smash the
bowl. Not only does a story like The Spoils of Poynton
show this, but in his letters he is quite explicit. Writing
to C. E. Norton in 1 8 8 6, he says : ‘The position of that
body’ (he is referring to the English upper class) ‘seems
to me to be in many ways very much the same rotten and
collapsible one as that of the French aristocracy before the
revolution — minus cleverness and conversation; or per-
haps it’s more like the heavy, congested and depraved

32 HENRY JAMES

Roman world upon which the barbarians came down.’
When the war came, it is true that James became an
English citizen and adopted the conventional trumpet
note which blew so grandly from most of the writers who
were ‘over age’ at that time. This was partly because he
had always hated Germany and looked on the Germans
as the enemies of the Latin civilization whose tradition
he loved and lived for. But there is also the realization
of a certain consistency in the war in these lines: ‘The
plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness
by the wanton feat of these two aristocrats is a thing that
so gives away the whole long age during which we have
supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement,
gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for
what the treacherous years were all the while really
making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.’

The vulgarity is not explained by his superficial snob-
bishness or by any ethical failing. The key to it is, in the
earlier novels, in his attitude to the body and to the sexual
act. In the last novels his attitude is quite altered, and
his extreme individualism has enabled him to accept
much which before he would have rejected with horror.
It is not that he ignores the sexual act; on the contrary,
it plays a very important part in many of his novels.
The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl^ and even,
to a large extent. The Ambassadors, are novels about
sexual subjects. The vulgarity consists at first in the
sexual act being regarded as the merest formality; and
secondly, in the later novels, in its being nearly always
presented as if it were base.

One of the earlier stories, Madame de Mauves, is an
account of an idealistic American woman whose romantic
ambition is to be married into an old French family. She
marries an aristocratic Frenchman, and then discovers

THE SCHOOL OF EXPERIENCE 33

that he is an egoist and a cad. A young American man
who visits her comes to realize the extent of her un-
happiness. Her husband, who is ‘carrying on’ with a
Frenchwoman, cynically proposes to the young American
that he should sleep with Madame de Mauves. But
Madame de Mauves is faithful to her idealism even when
in practice it has betrayed her. She sends him away. He
hears some years later that she also discovered the in-
fidelity of her husband, who repented and fell deeply in
love with her, but her disgust with him was such that
finally he shot himself.

Apart from the absurd ending, this story is told
in a way that is moving and beautiful. Its weakness is
caused by what I take to be the trait of vulgarity in
James’s mind. Not only is Madame de Mauves rightly
portrayed as being extremely cold, but her American
admirer seems to be several degrees colder. When the
suggestion has been implied, rather than made, that
Madame de Mauves should become his mistress, we are
told that he ‘was conscious of no distinct desire to “make
love’’ to her; if he could have uttered the essence of his
longing he would have said that he wished her to re-
member that in a world coloured grey to her vision by
the sense of her mistake there was one vividly honest
man.’ The sense of this is sympathetic, if it means that
he wished to remain faithful to her idea. But it is worth
noting that the very idea of making love has been put
into inverted commas, as though it were somehow ridicu-
lous and vulgar. Monsieur de Mauves’ behaviour, is, of
course, boorish and objectionable, but as we read on we
begin to wonder whether the horror with which the
young American seems to regard the whole topic of
physical love is not even more repulsive. We do not feel
that his respectability is due to any Christian codff of

34 HENRY JAMES

morality; it is simply the horror at imposing any vulgarity
on Madame de Mauves. James’s characters tend to be
pagans tempered by an upper-class sense of respectability.
We find that the very thought of a possible ‘happy
ending,’ in which Madame de Mauves and her lover could
frankly enjoy each other, is rather disgusting. In fact,
although James’s characters are full of moral passion, and
certainly of a passionate regard for each other, in his early
novels his lovers are not lovers.

His attitude to sex varied greatly in the course of his
development. In the early novels and stories, with the
exception of The Princess Casamassima, wherever James
approaches the physical side of life he seems to draw on
his gloves, and his nouns draw on their inverted commas.
When his subject is sex, he sheers away from it by reducing
it to a formality, and if one tries to imagine his characters
physically, one feels that one is lifting a veil which con-
ceals something repulsive. Here the vulgarity lies in the
tastelessness of what is artificial when a comparison is
forced with what is natural. The most obvious symptom
of his uneasiness is in his occasional indulgence in the
purely melodramatic, which, in the first books, strikes
such a surprisingly false note, until, in The Spoils of
Poynton, by an astonishing tour de force, he succeeds in
making a work of art out of a series of violent episodes.

In the books of the middle period, in which James is
preoccupied with problems of form, his attitude to sex
seems to have taken refuge in fantasy. There is a strange
ambiguity about the intention of such books as What
Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age, and about stories
like The Pupil and The Turn of the Screw. It is difficult
not to conclude that a rather infantile repressed sexual
curiosity governs the extraordinary convolutions of What
Maisie Knew, and that The Pupil is a fantasy about

THE SCHOOL OF EXPERIENCE 35

homosexuality. In the Henry James number of Hound
and Horn,^ Mr. Edmund Wilson, the author of one of
the best books of contemporary criticism, Axel's Castle.,
has worked out in great detail a theory that The Turn of
the Screw is a story of the repressed sexual delusions of
the governess who is the narrator. If so, the sexual
imagery is amazingly well worked out. The valet, whom
she sees, appears on a tower, and is dressed in the clothes
of the master, with whom she is in love. The governess,
her predecessor and rival, always appears behind a lake of
water. Every detail is correctly Freudian. The only
difficulty is that if the imagery were worked out con-
sciously, it is hardly likely that James would have antici-
pated Freud with such precision. The horrible solution
suggests itself that the story is an unconscious sexual
fantasy, or that James has entered into the repressed
governess’s situation with an intuition that imposed on
it a deeper meaning than he had intended.

In the later books, the sexual motif reappears in what
are really amazing forms. Firstly, in The Ambassadors,
the essential fact that Chad is living with Madame
de Vionnet is accepted by the American traveller, Strether
(the type of spectator that most interested James), with
the force of a revelation. Secondly, the heroine of The
Wings of the Dove, Milly, is a martyr to the brutal virility
of Kate and Densher, and to her own refusal or inability
to enter into their world of health and normality. Lastly,
in The Golden Bowl all these elements are fused, and
instead of one being offered the familiar Jamesian spec-
tacle of the single isolated person in conflict with the
intrigue of nature and marriage, one is offered a conflict
between two different sorts of marriage. The book
leaves no doubt that James considered the relationship
* Hound and Horn : Henry James Number, April to June 1934.

36 HENRY JAMES

of the father and daughter, Maggie and Mr. Verver, as
a marriage, which was interrupted by their each marrying,
and thus entering into a conflicting pair of marriages
outside their own relationship. It so happens that the
two outsiders, the two people to whom the father and
daughter are married, are also living together, and thus
a grotesque conflict is set up between the spiritual,
platonic marriage, and the marriage by nature of the two
adulterers.

It is difficult not to conclude that there was some
conflict in James’s mind on the subject of sex, which may
explain much about him. His unwillingness to face
certain aspects of reality may partly explain the with-
drawal of his art from the objective world, until he had
created a world of his own, in which it was possible for
that reality to appear either in a form in which it was
beautifully accepted (as in The Ambassadors).^ or in which
it was ‘shown up’ in its full horror.

In an article by Mr. Glenway Westcott in the same
number of Hound and Horn., a reference is made to a
rumour which persists in America: ‘Henry James;
expatriation and castration,’ and again, ‘Henry James, it
is rumoured, could not have had a child. But if he was
as badly hurt in the pre-Civil War accident as that — since
he triumphed powerfully over the other authors of his
epoch— perhaps the injury was a help to him.’ There is
another reference to the accident in Miss Rebecca West’s
little book on James. Apparently he was called on as a
volunteer to help with a fire engine to put out a bad fire.
There was an accident, in which he was very severely
scalded. In his letters he refers to an injury from which
he suffered all his life.

Whether the accident was as serious as has been main-
tained, or how it affected James, is now comparatively

THE SCHOOL OF EXPERIENCE 37

unimportant. But his attitude to sex, whatever its origin,
is important because it may also account for the prevalence
of death as an ending to his stories. Castration, or the
fear of castration, is supposed to preoccupy the mind
with ideas of suicide and death. ^ There is a type of
Jamesian character, Roderick Hudson, and all the Millies
and Maggies — there seem to be many of them — and
Hyacinth, and Owen Wingrave, and the children in The
Turn of the Screw, and the boy in The Pupil, whom it is
impossible to regard except in the light of death. The
preoccupation with death is so emphatic that it is difficult
to remember that, as an exception, Maggie Verver did
not die, at the end of The Golden Bowl.

In the ten years preceding the publication of Roderick
Hudson, his work was at its most melodramatic. There
is a full description of the stories he published at this
period in Mr. Beach’s The Method of Henry fames,
published by the Yale University Press. Most of these
stories seem to have been extremely violent. Mr. Beach
writes of one of them, called De Grey: a Romance'. ‘Feeling
and expression are always in the superlative degree. The
hero “cries out in an ecstasy of belief and joy.” The
heroine “turns deadly pale.” People rush madly, pre-
cipitately — and more than once. Piercing shrieks re-
sound through the house. A face “gleams through the
darkness like a mask of reproach, white with the phos-
phorescent dews of death ! ” ’ Henry J ames was twenty-five
years old when he wrote this story, so it cannot be regarded
as the outpouring of an adolescent. It is the crude ore of
a violence, sexual in origin, which is never very remote
from James’s novels, however smooth their surface.

The American, which was published in 1887, a year

^ The rumour of castration seems exaggerated and improbable, but it
seems likely that James sustained a serious injur}'.

38 HENRY JAMES

after Roderick Hudson^ is a mature work, but it is Eliza-
bethan in its mechanism. It is a story of a middle-aged
but vigorous, self-made American, who travels to Europe,
and in Paris tries to make a prosperous marriage with the
aristocratic daughter of a great French family. With her
he eventually, and rather incidentally, falls in love. The
family, tempted by his money, first of all accept him, and
then, finally, turn him down. The daughter, who loves
him, submits to her family, but refuses to marry anyone
else and finally buries herself in a convent.

The thin thread that gives the book its continuity
and much of its excellence, is (as James explains in the
preface to the complete edition), the character of Newman,
the American. In the violence of his disappointment,
Newman stumbles on a scandalous family secret. He
comes into possession of a paper written by his fiancee’s
father on his death-bed, proving that he was killed by her
mother. Newman has his opportunity of revenge. He
toys with the luxurious idea of exposing the whole
antique twelfth-century rotten family. But eventually
(this is the rather youthful conception that struck Henry
James while he was seated in or on an American horse-
car) he burns the paper and goes back to America.

Newman is certainly a grand figure, but most of the
other characters in the book are curiously ineffective.
Valentin, the attractive younger son of the aristocratic
family, is an exception. He is a far livelier figure than
his sister, and his relationship with Newman is far more
convincing and more passionate than Newman’s relation-
ship with her. In the same way, in Roderick Hudson, the
relationship between Rowland and Roderick is more real
to us than is the relationship of either with his girl friend.
Moreover, the women in James’s early books are far too
conscientiously drawn, when compared with his men.

THE SCHOOL OF EXPERIENCE 39

who seem more spontaneous. That James was perhaps
conscious of this deliberation is shown in both the title
and the whole manner of The Portrait of a Lady. A third of
this book is taken up with brush-work which has nothing
to do with the story, but much to do with James’s deter-
mination that he would really present Isabel Archer to us.

Apart from the character of Newman, The American
is made memorable by certain very dramatic scenes, and
by flashes of profound psychological observation. It is
this psychological insight which makes the total effect of
the decrepit, proud, destructive old family far more real
than the character of any one of its members. The
Marquise de Bellegarde attempts to kill her husband by
not giving him the dose of medicine which will revive
him after he has had a stroke. He faints, but recovers.
When he is better, but still very weak, she comes back
into the room :

‘She came up to the bed and put in her head between
me and the Count. The Marquis saw her and gave a
sound like the wail of a lost soul. He said something we
couldn’t understand, and then a convulsion seemed to
take him. . . . The Marquis was stone dead — the sight
of her had done for him.’

The way in which this is realized is perhaps rather
absurd, but the underlying meaning is not at all absurd.
The great family, European aristocracy, Versailles peopled
with ghosts, seem purely destructive to the hearty,
healthy intruder, who is made to see himself as a bar-
barian. It is a strange contrast with the later novels,
where James takes often the side of the aristocrats whom
he regards here as dead; with The Ambassadors, which is
so like it in many ways, where Strether, the American, is
fighting against his compatriots for the French family. In
the earlier book the French aristocratic family speaks the

40 HENRY JAMES

language of death. It repels the inflow of new American
life, and it even suicidally refuses the money which might
revive its splendour.

All the family are dead, or ghosts. The Marquise
destroys her husband’s life and the happiness of her
daughter. The attractive but purposeless younger son is
killed in a farcical, anachronistic duel. The daughter,
because she attempts to escape from her death at home,
is self-condemned to a living tomb, for that is Newman’s
vision of a Carmelite convent. The remaining members
of the family are living corpses.

In Roderick Hudson, Roderick comes to Europe and
dies because he is surfeited with all the things that
were new and rare to him when he was exiled from
them in America. In Europe, he is drowned by the
excess of riches. In The American, Europe resists the
invader and he returns to America, having witnessed the
suicide of a great and ancient family. This triumph of the
barbarian may have given James the same sort of com-
pensatory satisfaction as Lawrence got from describing
the seduction of an aristocrat by a gamekeeper. In The
Portrait of a Lady, the American, Caspar Goodwood, with
all his crude virtue, fails to recapture Isabel from Osmond,
who represents another and shallower but sinister aspect of
Europe.

The death theme in Henry James’s work has a signifi-
cance which extends far beyond that of the ‘International
Situation.’ In the first place, as I have pointed out, it
probably has a bearing on his own psychology. Secondly,
it is part of a tradition derived from Hawthorne, and
extending far beyond James into a great mass of modern
imaginative literature. The debt of contemporary litera-
ture to Hawthorne is made clear in Lawrence’s essay on
The Scarlet Letter, in his Studies in American Classical

THE SCHOOL OF EXPERIENCE 41

Literature. In a typical Hawthorne novel such as The
Blythedale Romance., there are all the typical properties of
an early James story or novel. There is Priscilla, the weak,
suffering, simple orphan, who is easily imposed on by
the designing, unscrupulous, healthy, sexual, intelligent,
slightly vulgar, Zenobia. The narrator is a poet of rather
weak character who is constitutionally incapable of par-
ticipating in any way in the lives of the other characters,
much as he would like to do so. There is a passionate
crusading ‘reformist’ character, Hollingsworth, who is
anxious to build a home for converting criminals. He
is the grandfather of characters like Caspar Goodwood,
or like Waymarsh in The Ambassadors. Most significant of
all, is the atmosphere of death which pervades the whole
book. It is clear enough that in order to be good and
beautiful you have to live on the spiritual plane. In order
to do that you renounce the struggle against nature, and
you fall a victim to healthier, less scrupulous and more
primitive people. Actually, in The Blythedale Romance, it
is the healthy Zenobia who commits suicide; but the point
is, that if she had not done so Priscilla would have died.
If James had written The Blythedale Romance he could
not have accepted the sanguine view of a providence that
killed Zenobia and spared Priscilla. This New England
puritanical view of life pervades James, and is the
crudest explanation of the moral feeling behind the
deaths of so many of his characters. It is a harsh, logical,
unscrupulous puritanism — quite unlike the English re-
spectable Puritanism which simply ignores three-quarters
of life. The classical American puritanism, on the con-
trary, hunts out and persecutes the physical side of
life. It follows that the good people are those who
are most successful in thwarting their physical desires;
they therefore fall easy victims to people less disastrously

42 HENRY JAMES

preoccupied, unless, indeed, quite unaided, they manage
to kill themselves by contracting some nameless internal
disease, particularly consumption. But James differed
from Hawthorne in being a puritan who did not believe
in the puritan morality.

Not only is this view of life the background of James’s
novels, but American literature seems never to have escaped
from it. For instance, it is violently apparent in the
novels of William Faulkner. There are symptoms of it even
in Hemingway, although the heroine of A Farewell to Arms
expresses only what one might term a ‘veiled purity,’ in
being less dissipated than the other characters in the book.
Their dissipation is also an inverted puritanism. One
does not have to search far for puritanism in T. S. Eliot.

The psychological attitude of much modern literature,
especially that of D. H. Lawrence, is implicit in the little
scene in The American^ in which the Marquise de Belle-
garde, by an act of the will, murders her husband. The
over-developed, destructive, perverse, egoistic will, is the
instrument which destroys the Bellegarde family, which
prevents them from sharing with an instinctive pleasure
the new forms of life (American life) outside them.

At the beginning of The American there is a curious
passage in which Newman describes how he came to
throw up his chance of making more money in America,
and to decide on his travels :

‘The idea of not coming by that half-million in that
particular way, of letting it utterly slide and scuttle and
never hearing of it again, became the one thing to save
my life from a sudden danger. And all this took place
quite independently of my will, and I sat watching it as if
it were a play at the theatre. I could feel it going on inside
me. You may depend upon it that there are things going
on inside us that we understand mighty little about.’

THE SCHOOL OF EXPERIENCE

43

So that the vitality of Newman is of a kind which is
opposed to that concentration of an egoistic will which
makes the Bellegarde family so hang on to every shred
of their decayed grandeur, and which, in circumstances
which he rejected, could have established him as a tena-
cious, self-made man.

Newman is alive and solidly real, because he is not
completely either made or on the make. He is aware of,
and to some extent guided by, the movements of an
energy within himself which is larger than his conscious
will. He is, in an almost crude sense, a worshipper of
life. Although he is not cultured, he has taste and a high
standard of social behaviour. He is incapable of the
homicidal tastelessness of the Bellegardes, because he is
innocent, and therefore his natural humanity is incapable
of gross tastelessness. The old English nurse and care-
taker of the family likes him as she would like a child.
In the final issue he is always capable of falling back on
the illumination of that ‘ idea’ which saved him from
that extra half-million, and which set him wandering
along the galleries of the Louvre. He is, in fact,
a romantically conceived figure ; James’s version of
Rousseau’s savage. He is as sharply contrasted with the
figures of the Bellegarde family as is broad daylight with
the obscurity of the night.

We come now to The Princess Casamassima. Christina
Light, the exotic traveller from Roderick Hudson^ marries
a prince and becomes a princess in the book which is
named after her. She continues her career of charm and
destruction, and in this book the person whom she helps
to destroy is a young man called Hyacinth, the illegitimate
son of an earl by a prostitute, who is brought up by a
seamstress.

James explains in the introduction how he came to

44 HENRY JAMES

write this book, partly because he was not satisfied with
his treatment of Christina in the earlier novel, and partly
as the result of ‘the habit and interest of walking the
streets’ in London. The conjunction of Christina with the
‘great grey Babylon,’ results in a brilliant book, quite
unlike any other book he wrote, a book in the broad
English tradition of Dickens and Thackeray.

The moving and realistic description of the life of Miss
Pynsent, the seamstress, and her charge; of their visit to
the prison where Hyacinth’s mother lies dying; of the
people who surround them; of Mr. Vetch, the old
violinist; and lastly, of the young revolutionaries whom
Hyacinth joins. All these things lead one to believe that
James is really attempting to give a picture of the whole
London scene. But when we meet Lady Aurora, the
delightfully typical Socialist aristocrat who devotes her
life to working, in a crazy way, amongst the poor, and
then the Prince and the Princess, we realize that we are
only looking at the same aristocratic setting from the
wings.

Yet the observation of political types in this book is
remarkable, and curiously undated. Hyacinth, with his
strong leaning towards the upper classes, and yet his
feeling that he is somehow committed to the cause of the
workers, might to-day have become a Socialist Prime
Minister, who, at the height of his power, would dismay
his followers by too frankly going over to the other side.

Paul Muniment, Hyacinth’s friend, is a true revolu-
tionary type. He has the egoism, the sense of self-
preservation, the cynicism, of a person who identifies
himself so completely with a cause that he goes through
life objectively guarding himself from all approach, as
one might preserve for the supreme event a very intricate
and valuable bomb. Paul certainly seems to betray

THE SCHOOL OF EXPERIENCE

45

Hyacinth when he becomes a captive of the Princess
Casamassima, yet one has a feeling that James does him
less than justice and that he withheld in himself reserves
of revolutionary interest.

Another character, the Cockney girl, Millicent Hen-
ning, is the most sensual of all James's women. She is a
thorough Londoner, and yet she has the physical vigour
of some woman off the streets of Rome, as she moves
through the book with a Southern freedom of speech and
gesture.

In fact, James went further in the way of observation
in this than in any other book. For once, he painted in the
whole background of the International Scene. After this,
he certainly recorded new types, and new phases of
society, such as that represented by Gabriel Nash in The
Tragic Muse. The Oscar Wilde type interested him in
the same way as did the Coleridge type, which he recorded
so brilliantly in The Coxon Fund., or the Shelley type whose
ghost haunts the pages of The Aspern Papers. But these
were, after all, only new manifestations of the social world
which so intrigued him. Even his stories about childhood
are only new ways of holding up the mirror to the upper
class, or sometimes to what one might call the pseudo-
upper-class, which interested him at one time still more,
in such studies as The Pupil and What Maisie Knew.

The theme of The Princess Casamassima is essentially the
same as that of The American and Roderick Hudson. It is
the death of a society. Here, indeed, it is seen in an in-
clusive form, for not only is the society, which the Princess
forsakes in her search for life, implicitly decadent (even
the gesture of forsaking it is a typical symptom of b^
longing to it), but the revolutionaries themselves ^re
suicidal. The intrigue in which Hyacinth finds hufiself
caught, is an assassination as pointless as the duel iawhich

46 HENRY JAMES

Valentin (in The American) is killed. Hyacinth himself
is a feeble revolutionary, and his existence as a bastard
makes him a living contradiction in terms of class. The
friend on whom he relies seems to go over to the other
side, and, at any rate, betrays him.

In these novels of James’s first period, we see him at
work observing European society, and we are able to
read into his conclusions. After the publication of the
last of them. The Tragic Muse^ for three years he took to
writing for the stage. Then followed the beginning of
the retreat of his work into a world of inner experience.

II

LIFE AS ART AND ART AS LIFE

The tragic muse is a book in which all the conflicting
aspects of life which interested James at this time are re-
presented; the life of political action, the aesthetic life
and the drama. The drama was for the next few years to
win, and it might always have held him, had his plays
succeeded in attracting audiences.

It seems that James, like most writers of great in-
tegrity, secretly yearned for success, even in the most
vulgar and public sense. With his earliest books he had,
indeed, achieved a certain fame; everyone had read Daisy
Miller^ and in London society he himself became to some
extent a social, literary lion. But he did not repeat the
success of Daisy Miller^ and with his failure on the stage
he definitely abandoned the hope of popularity. In his
letters there is a frequent note of slight but bitter disappoint-
ment at this comparative worldly failure. Sometimes it
even takes the form of his declaring that he only goes on
writing in order to make money, which seems to be an
apologia, since he was never in any pressing financial
need. He had fairly ample private means.

Since the public ceased to show that intelligently
responsive critical interest in his work which is an almost
necessary stimulus to creation (although most artists have to
learn to do without it; without its intelligence, at all events),
he replied by showing less interest in them. He retired
more and more into the inventions of his own mind.

The contrast between the life which he had seen and

M

48 HENRY JAMES

described and the life which he now began to invent from
his own inner experience is clearly enough explained in
the preface to the volume of stories about artists, called,
in the Collected Edition, The Lesson of The Master.
‘Whereas any anecdote about life, pure and simple, as it
were, proceeds almost as a matter of course from some
jog of fond fancy’s elbow, some pencilled note on some-
body else’s case, so the material for any picture of personal
states so specifically complicated as those of my hapless
friends in the present volume will have been drawn pre-
ponderantly from the depths of the designer’s own mind.’

From the same depths are drawn The Awkward Age,
The Spoils of Poynton, The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the
Screw, What Maisie Knew, In the Cage, and many other of
the stories of this period, especially what he called the
‘nouvelles,’ as distinct from the short stories which are
more in the nature of the anecdote.

The relation of these nouvelles to the school of his
experience is interesting, because the seed of most of
them was some real occurrence. James tells in his prefaces
how in conversation he would hear the allusion which
was the ‘germ’: he would not listen for more than the
germ, because to hear all, impeded the creative process
that had already started in his mind. He describes how
one such allusion from the lady seated next to him at a
dinner party, gave him the idea of The Spoils of Poynton.
‘There had been but ten words, yet I had recognized in
them, as in a flash, all the possibilities of the little drama
of my Spoils, which glimmered then and there into life;
so that when in the next breath I began to hear of action
taken, on the beautiful ground, by our engaged adver-
saries, tipped each, from that instant, with the light of the
highest distinction, I saw clumsy Life again at her stupid
work.’

LIFE AS ART AND ART AS LIFE 49

The dislike of ‘clumsy Life’ grew on him, so that even
in his autobiographical books, Notes of a Son and Brother
and A Small Boy and Others^ he constantly adds^««A to
incidents. It is not that he heightens or retouches, but
that he distinguishes and isolates in order to give its full
significance to each incident. What he revered in Life
was Art, and one may legitimately add that what he
revered in Art was Life. When he altered one or two
details in his brother William’s Letters before he printed
the quotations from them which appear in Notes of a Son
and Brother^ he apologized to his protesting nephew, in
a letter: ‘It was as if he had said to me on seeing me lay
hands on the weak little relics of our common youth, “Oh,
but you’re not going to give me away, to hand me over,
in my raggedness and my poor accidents, quite un-
helped, unfriendly: you’re going to do the best for me you
can, aren’t you, and since you appear to be making such
claims for me, you’re going to let me seem to justify
them as much as I possibly can ’ He clears the matter
up further in a generalization which applies to his life’s
work (he was seventy when he wrote this letter), ‘I have
to the last point the instinct and the sense for fusions and
interrelations, for framing and encircling (as I think I
have already called it) every part of my stuff in every other
— and that makes a danger when the frame and circle
play over too much upon the image.’

He was not, of course, isolated, in the ’eighties and
’nineties, in adopting this ‘aesthetic’ attitude which could
easily be interpreted as a part of the general con-
temporary pose that art was more important than life.
He almost became part of the movement, when his
stories about the life of the artist appeared regularly
in The Tellow Book. He was, of course, a much more
serious artist than Wilde or any of that lot (with the

50 HENRY JAMES

exception of Yeats, who was then a young man), and his
battle for art only superficially resembled theirs. They
were fighting for a unique and exemplary, pure and
original gesture of ‘Art for Art’s sake.’ He was fighting,
like Eliot in our time, but in a more comprehensive,
genial way (I believe), for traditionalism. Some of his
critical observations quite strikingly resemble certain
remarks of Eliot in his essay on Tradition and the Indi-
vidual Talent. One is his comment to W. D. Howells on
the prefaces which he wrote for the Collected Edition of
his works. ‘They are, in general, a sort of plea for
Criticism, for Discrimination, for Appreciation on other
than infantile lines — as against the so almost universal
absence of these things; which tends so, in our general
trade, it seems to me, to break the heart.’ Then there is
his account of The Altar oj the Dead in his preface to the
volume named after that story: ‘The sense of the state of
the dead is but part of the state of the living,’ which
reminds one of Eliot’s remark about the dead writers:
‘Precisely, and they are that which we know.’

What distinguishes James from the aesthetes is his
extraordinary sense of life, as distinct from reported experi-
ence. Writers like Wilde and Lionel Johnson, and even
Whistler, were so deeply embroiled in various sensations
and memorable experiences, that it was natural for
them to think of Art as something cut off from life.
James had nothing of what they would call life; life to
him was as much a separate activity from his own life as
Art with a big A. He therefore had a reverent dis-
interested sense of what life was, because his approach
to it was not through his living, but through his art. He
is one of the very few artists who, when he talks of ‘life,’
makes one feel that he means something which cannot
be instantly replaced by some word such as ‘sex,’ or

LIFE AS ART AND ART AS LIFE 51

‘business/ or ‘success.’ His art for him was only valuable
because it was the means of creating life. And to the
thesis that applied to himself that art was life, there
followed the antithesis that life was art, which accounts
for so much of the characterization in his later work,
where he described people who were artists in creating
their own, and in their approach to other people’s lives.

The Figure in the Carpet is the story of a novelist of
genius who meets a young man interested in making a
critical study of his work. He tells the young man that
there is in all his work ‘an idea without which I wouldn’t
have given a straw for the whole job. It’s the finest
fullest intention of the lot, and the application of it has
been, I think, a triumph of patience, of ingenuity.’ This
secret of his work is called ‘the figure in the carpet.’ The
young man fails to discover the secret, and the author dies
without revealing it.

A great temptation is afforded, because in many of
James’s books there is a pattern, an arrangement of
symmetry in the plot, which governs the lives of his
people. We are reminded of his description in the preface
to The Awkward Age of how when he was explaining to the
conductors of Harpers Magazine his plan of the book. ‘I
remember that in sketching my project ... I drew on a
sheet of paper . . . the neat figure of a circle consisting
of a number of small rounds disposed at equal distance
about a central object. The central object was my situa-
tion, my subject in itself, to which the thing would owe
its title, and the small rounds represented so many dis-
tinct lamps, as I liked to call them, the function of each of
which would be to light with all due intensity one of its
aspects.’ This arrangement resembles the extremely
complex arrangement of the parents and step-parents
in What Maisie Knew, so that one gets there a small

52 HENRY JAMES

algebraic system. If one imagines the parents as A and B,
and their respective lovers as X and Y, then Maisie is
free to work out all the possible combinations, AB, AY,
XY, and BX, of the symbols, which she does, with
an almost fiendish intensity. Or the distribution of
marriages in The Golden Bowl, made possible by the
grotesque social inconsistency that the relationship of
the rich Mr. Verver to his daughter Maggie is, in effect,
marriage.

Yet this finding of patterns is too crude and obvious
and elaborate to satisfy the very simple conditions of
Hugh Vereker’s figure. If we look for the analogy in
James’s work, there is one remark in the story which
does provide a clue. ‘What I contend that nobody has
ever mentioned in my work is the organ of life.’

The organ of life is, in fact, the whole complex system
of James’s middle and later work; the method of indirect
presentation, or ‘his rummy manner,’ as William James
called it. He is— to an extent quite unprecedented
amongst novelists— a creative artist, and what he main-
tains he was creating by his peculiar method of approach,
is life. The clue is that precisely those principles in his
work which seem to us at first most artificial, the imposed
mathematical pattern, the perversely forced symmetry,
create a pattern and an unity (the ‘organ of life’) which
is fundamental, where personality and character lie
on the surface. In order to understand this, one must
forget all the standards by which one compares James’s
novels, which are, as it were, creating by their organic
unity the whole process of life, with novels of annotation
and observation, which are recording manners and
imitating characters and the symptoms of a social life.

The best analogy to James is not to be found in prose
writing at all, but in poetry or music; more particularly in

LIFE AS ART AND ART AS LIFE 53

music. James’s phrase, ‘the organ of life’, obviously could
be applied to Beethoven’s Third Symphony, or, in a sense
more easily comparable with James, to some elaborated
work with constant suggestions of something in nature
which is mysteriously indicated— perhaps something
French— like C^sar Franck’s Symphonic Variations. It
is impossible to understand what seems the unnecessary
complexity, the specialized characterization, the forced
intellectual interest, of a book like The Golden Bowl^ unless
one realizes that the nature of this art is symphonic; that
it most nearly resembles music.

The musical analogy holds again and again. Precisely
the beauty of such stories as The Aspem Papers and The
Turn of the Screw is that one finds in them a rare, inac-
cessible and pure poetry which reminds one of the music
of Gluck. Consider also the uses of Paris in The Am-
bassadors'^ the effect of the town against the characters is
like the contrast of a vast subterranean orchestra against
the single leading instruments of a concerto.

Fortunately, James’s manner of composition is clear
to us, as the notes of two of his unfinished novels have
been published. These notes convey a feeling, not of
the observation of life, not of rapportage^ but of the
creation of living, pressing forms of life. To grasp
the whole pattern, to breathe all the excitement, and
to follow all the difficult yet urgent thematic argu-
ments, one has to read these notes. They remind
one of Beethoven’s sketch books, or of his account,
reported somewhere, of how he heard a theme and lost
it and then pursued it unceasingly, until it was clear.
Here is a passage from the notes of The Sense of the Past,
where the young American traveller from the modern
world tells his secret to his charming eighteenth-century
cousin:

54 HENRY JAMES

‘He breaks down under the beautiful pity of her
divination, the wonder of her so feeling for him that she
virtually knows, or knows enough; and the question is
here, of course, isn’t it? . . . That’s what it comes to,
what it has come to, very much indeed it would seem;
that’s what the situation would seem to mean, would appear
to have to give, as who should say, of finest: their being
face to face over all the prodigious truth— which I think
there ought to be a magnificent schne a faire in illustration
of. The beauty, the pathos, the terror of it dwells thus in
his throwing himself upon her for help— for help “to get
out,’’ literally, help which she can somehow give him. The
logic, the exquisite, of this to be kept tight hold of, with
one’s finger on every successive link of the chain. But
voyons un feu the logic; which, expressed in the plainest,
the most mathematical terms possible, is that what this
“retributive’’ admonition signifies for him is, he feels, that
he is going to be left'

Then there are the notes in The Ivory Tower for his
first intuition of Haughty’s character: ‘Yes, there glim-
mers, there glimmers; something really more interesting,
I think, than the mere nefarious act; something like a
profoundly nefarious attitude, or even genius: I see, I
really think I see, the real fine truth of the matter in
that.' We may compare these quotations with the account
of his inspiration which he scribbled one night on a sheet
of paper, which is published in the Letters, and also
quoted, more effectively than I can use it, in Herbert
Read’s Form in Modern Poetry:

‘Momentary side-winds — things of no real authority —
break in every now and then to put their inferior little
questions to me; but I come back, I come back, as I say,
I, all throbbingly and yearningly and passionately, oh,
mon bon^ come back to this way that is clearly the only

LIFE AS ART AND ART AS LIFE 55

one in which I can do anything now, and that will open
out to me more and more, and that has overwhelming
reasons pleading all beautifully in its breast. What really
happens is that the closer I get to the problem of the
application of it in any particular case, the more I get into
that application, so that the more doubts and torments
fall away from me, the more I know where I am, the more
everything spreads and shines and draws me on and Fm
justified in my logic and my passion. . . . Causons^ causons^
mon bon — oh, celestial, soothing, sanctifying process, with
all the high sane forces of the sacred time fighting,
through it, on my side! Let me fumble it gently and
patiently out — with fever and fidget laid to rest — as in
the old enchanted months! It only looms, it only shines
and shimmers, too beautiful and too interesting; it only
hangs there too rich and too full and with too much
to give and to pay; it only presents itself too admirably
and too vividly, too straight and square and vivid, as
a little organic and effective Action. ..."

Henry James’s artistic method is thus not at all the
method of the novelist who arranges his observations
until they form a pattern, or a unity illustrating some
philosophy. There is an interesting passage in the preface
to The Portrait of a Lady which helps to show what his
method of approach is:

‘There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth
in this connexion than that of the perfect dependence of
the “moral” sense of a work of art on the amount of felt
life concerned in producing it. The question comes back
thus, obviously, to the kind and degree of the artist’s
prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his
subject springs. The quality and capacity of that soil,
its capacity to “grow” with due freshness and straightness
any vision of life, represents, strongly weakly, the

SALAR JUMG LIBRARY

56 HENRY JAMES

projected morality. . . . Here we get exactly the high
price of the novel as a literary form— its power not only,
while preserving that form with closeness, to range
through all the differences of the individual relation to its
general subject-matter, all the varieties of outlook on life,
of disposition to reflect and project, created by conditions
that are never the same from man to man (or, as far as that
goes, from woman to woman), but positively to appear
more true to its character in proportion as it strains, or
tends to burst, with a latent extravagance, its mould.’ ^

This is the best defence of his characterization,
which has been attacked often on the ground that his
people are special cases, too clever to be human. His
characters are not meant to be real in the sense that they
are copies of the people whom, in life, they represent.
They are only taken from life in the same way as the
little allusion which was the germ of The Spoils of Poynton
was taken from life. They are not portraits, but symbols
of the types which they represent; in the same way as the
characters in Shakespeare are not people whom one
would meet in everyday life, but are yet symbols repre-
senting in their most significant form people who are real.

What he, better than any other novelist realized, is
that Art, which is merely a reflexion of life, is either not
Art but rapportage, or else Death Art. Constructive and
living Art is always struggling against a stream of mere
phenomena in order to create life.

When one is considering the historic position of a
writer like James, it is important to remember that,
although he is a novelist, he is also fulfilling other func-
tions that were not fulfilled by the poets and dramatists

^ I have used here the same quotations as are chosen by R. P.
Blackmur in his Essay on ‘The Critical Prefaces’ published in Hound
and Homy Henry James Number. I am greatly indebted to this Essay.

LIFE AS ART AND ART AS LIFE 57

of his time. In the same way as, when veins are removed
from the body, the blood will find other passages through
which to flow back to the heart; so, when the drama, and,
particularly, the poetic drama is dead, it becomes the
function of other writing to replace it. The best evidence
of the inadequacy of what James would call ‘the amount
of felt life’ in modern poetry, is the existence of that
attempted substitute for narrative and dramatic poetry,
the poetic novel. And James in his novels was to a con-
siderable degree always describing the effects of poetry and
of poetic drama. It is part of his greatness, though, that
he does not fall into the trap of writing poetic prose. In
his own unique, passionately inventive medium, he simply
describes the feelings of people which in a less creatively
repressed age than that of his contemporaries, or an age of
less debased moral values, would have become poetry.

More apparent is his substitution of drama. Having
himself failed to write plays for the stage, and being pro-
foundly aware of the need for an existing dramatic tra-
dition, he lifted scenes off the stage and presented them
in his books. In the same way as he wrote described
poetry, he wrote described drama. Not only is the
dialogue in his later books built up into the scene, but the
meditative and descriptive passages, all related through
the minds of different characters, have the force of the
soliloquy in the Elizabethan play. In one of his letters
he explains the dramatic method of The Awkward Agex
‘—A form all dramatic and scenic— of presented episodes,
architecturally combined and each making a piece of the
building; with no going behind, no telling about the figures
save by their own appearance and action and with explana-
tions reduced to the explanation of everything by all the
other things in the picture.’

We now see in array the inventions and technical

58 HENRY JAMES

devices of his art, all uniting to compose that symmetry
in his work which he calls ‘the organ of life.’ Life at its
most explicit, acted by people whose every gesture is
part of an argument sustained by high intelligence. A
life in which the palette of the sensations is as deliberately
restrained as are the colours of his contemporary, Whistler.
No one ever seems to sweat in a James novel, or suddenly
loses his temper, or gets blind drunk, or gets randy. The
emphasis is always on horizontal emotions which flow
and grow and are part of the pulse of life, not breaking
across it. Yet one is always aware of a great intellectual
passion, weighing more heavily on the mind, as one
follows the endless variations of the growing love or pain
or understanding.

Part of the atmosphere of restraint is provided by the
simplicity of his subjects. He is a symbolist in the sense
that when he is best he takes an extremely simple subject,
so simple that it can either be regarded as a thing which
one can hold or look at from every angle, or else yet
simpler, so that it can be comprehended in the title of the
book or story: The Ivory Tower, The Golden Bowl, The
Spoils of Boynton. He then does explore his object to the
fullest extent, with the intensity of a crystal-gazer.

If one takes a typical section of his prose— a story such
as The Aspern Papers, or a ‘book’ from The Wings of the
Dove or The Golden Bowl, one is aware of three main con-
current strands of what one might call the ‘morality,’ as
distinct from the typical Jamesian devices. The first of
these is the pattern of social life, the world of appearances,
of money, of habitations and dress, all elaborately ‘placed,’
which is the surface texture of the writing; above this,
constantly thrown up from it, is the fantastic psychological
imagery of the desires and frustrated wishes, which is as
present to his characters as is the phenomenal world.

LIFE AS ART AND ART AS LIFE 59

James’s intuitive genius lies in his unerring use of such
imagery; his people live not only in the ‘real’ world, but
also in a world of their own daydreams and their own
psychological frustration. A part of their conversation is
the things they say to themselves, the things that they
would like to say to one another, and the things that
somehow by a kind of unspoken intuitive language they
do convey to each other. James never forgets this in-
voluntary life of impulse, desire, and instinctive illumina-
tion. His characters, worldly as they may superficially
seem, are constantly subject to visions, to moments of
revelation, to inspired action. This is what gives their life
a moral significance which illumines all their thought,
and which makes them capable of good and evil, in spite
of their preoccupation with the aesthetic side of behaviour.

Underneath the other two strands there runs the
strand of plot, of destiny. The thread which is beyond
their control, and which leads in The Wings of the Dove to
the death of Milly and to the frustration of Kate’s and
Densher’s happiness.

Destiny is in James’s books closely linked to the
decadence of the people he is describing, and to their
social conditions. The decadence makes them, to a great
extent, victims of their environment and of their tradition ;
they are limited in their range of action; they are prac-
tically incapable, for example, of living an admirable life
without a great deal of money.

Money is in these novels the golden key that enables
people to live in a world where they are free to plot their
lives beautifully, and to act significantly. James has been
severely criticized for this materialist view. There is a
confusion in this criticism, because one has only to read
his letters to realize that the whole business of money and
money-making disgusted him. It simply struck him as

6o HENRY JAMES

a part of the moral incongruity and decadence of the
world he was studying, that without this stained and dis-
honoured money, a life that was civilized and intelligent
was practically impossible. This point of view has been
the inspiration of many Socialists, and it was commonly
held by liberal-minded and cultured people before the
war. For example, one finds it running through E. M.
Forster’s novel, Howard's End. James’s insistence on
means was his reaction from business; he insisted that his
characters must be free from the appalling dullness of
‘making’ money. In order to free them, they must either
be paupers or else have the money already made for
them. He was a scientific social observer, in the sense that
the centre of his interest was fixed on one small class of
people, the economic conditions of whose lives were
parasitic, so that they were free to lead the kind of life
which seemed to him the peak of interest in our civiliza-
tion. They were the highest product of history, and in
them one could see the depths to which the tradition had
sunk. In confining his attention to this small class he was
like a specialist who studies the behaviour of a certain
metal at a certain temperature.

Because money has a symbolic value in his work, it has
been assumed that a passion for money was a part of
James’s social snobbery. No doubt he liked the best that
Europe could give. He remarked to Desmond Mac-
Carthy that he could ‘stand a good deal of gold.’ How-
ever, the fascination of gold in his books is that it is at
once the symbol of release from the more servile processes
of the world in which we live, and also supremely the
symbol of the damned.

ti, It is the symbol of the damned firstly because nothing
in our civilization (as it now is) can ever atone for the
wickedness of acquiring it, and secondly, because it

LIFE AS ART AND ART AS LIFE

6i

damns the people who happen to possess it without
having acquired it, since it has been got for them.

The horror of acquiring it is doubly dealt with in The
Wings of the Dove. Densher and Kate damn themselves
in getting it, and Milly is destroyed by having it. His
last book. The Ivory Tower, shows signs that it might have
been full of a Timonesque rage against money. It opens
with a study of the death of two terrible old cronies, one
a swindler of great personal charm and human under-
standing, the other an honest business man whose mind
has become a machine for calculation, and who dies with
disgust because he has reason to believe that the swindler
may recover. The feeling that ‘every dollar is damned’
hangs over the two heirs, a young man and a young
woman. The young woman hates every dollar she has;
the young man, in an endeavour to make the best of a
heritage, the use of which he does not in the least under-
stand, puts all his affairs in the charge of a friend. The
friend. Haughty, swindles him, and Gray watches the
extent of his dishonesty grow and grow, with a feeling
partly of sympathy, partly of amused disgust. In addition
to this, in an ornament, a drawer of the ivory tower, there
is concealed a letter from the dead financier explaining
in detail to Gray the extent of his uncle’s (from whom he
has inherited his fortune) dishonesty. In the notes for
James’s private use, which are published at the end of
the unfinished book, there is a contemptuous reference
to the ‘overdone idealism’ of ‘Rockefellers and their like.’
One could not go much further than James has done in
this posthumously published work to show
whole money machine.

There are even occasions on which James’s characters
consider renouncing their chances of gaining money.
Densher proposes to Kate in The Wings of the Dove that

62 HENRY JAMES

they should marry on what they have— which is nothing.
But a respectable marriage on nothing, is a prospect which
she cannot face, with the example of her smart, plausible,
penniless scamp of a father, and her drudge of a sister
before her. James explains, though, in the notes to The
Ivory Tower thiit Gray was a character he had always longed
to create; someone who refused utterly to be on the make.
In The Spoils of Poynton, that violent Chekhovian comedy,
it is the things themselves, the Spoils, which are evil, which
destroy the happiness of all the people who are interested
in them. And every possible variation of interest is repre-
sented. The collector’s interest of Mrs. Gereth, the pure
aesthetic almost disinterested sympathy and appreciation
of Fleda, the righteous appropriation of Owen, and the
commercial grabbing of his fiancee and her family. There
is no story to compare with this for the sense of moral
blame which emanates from the precious objects and
attaches to one person after another in the story. At the
end of the story, when the house with all its treasures
is seen in flames, one becomes aware of what was always
wrong; it was the Spoils themselves.

The symbol of corruption is not the wealth, but the
misapplication of wealth in our civilization, just as in
other civilizations wealth is the symbol of the finest
creativeness, the greatest artistic achievement. The cor-
ruption of our time is partly also that wealth can only be
obtained by the vulgarest, that is to say the most deathly,
means; the tradition of a great aristocracy, of a great
cultural past is, as it were, basely misapplied. Money is,
in James’s books, a symbol for the corruption of the past
in the life of the present; it is a corrupted tradition. If one
accepts this convention, one sees that the action of a
person in his novels who refused to make or acquire
money (Gray already has it) would be irrelevant; it would

LIFE AS ART AND ART AS LIFE 63

correspond to the action of someone who cuts himself
off from tradition, who emigrates.

Civilization, tradition, high intelligence, tact, under-
standing, the ability to love and to suffer, are the chief
moral values which one finds in James’s work. There
is a tendency of his characters to regard the intelligent
as the beautiful and the beautiful in behaviour as the good.
The passive moral quality of these almost dead people is
their ability to feel and to atone for evil, by suffering.
Individualism becomes a value which applies to his
whole view of life, both for himself and for his creations.
At the end of his life he wrote in a letter: T believe
only in absolutely independent, individual and lonely
virtue, and in the serenely unsociable practice of the
same; the observation of a lifetime having convinced me
that no fruit ripens but under that temporarily graceless
rigour, and that the associational process for bringing it
on is but a bright and hollow artifice.’

His belief in sensibility, of course, followed from his
belief in the supreme value of the experience of indi-
viduals: ‘If there be a wisdom in not feeling— to the last
throb — the great things that happen to us, it is a wisdom
I shall never either know or esteem.’

But, in being individual, it was not an isolated sensi-
bility. It was a sensibility which made one acutely part
of the world and time in which one was living: ‘The
roaring, rushing world seems to me myself — with its brutal
and vulgar racket — all the while a less and less enticing
place for living in.’

He had no political opinions. Only an intense awareness
of existing opinion. He wrote to his nephew, in 1899:
‘Thank God, I’ve no opinions — not even on the Dreyfus
case. I’m more and more aware of things as a mere mad
panorama, phantasmagoria and dime museum.’

66 HENRY JAMES

not impressed by, and who did not kow-tow to, these
things, his polite absurd conversational mannerisms, his
‘my dear lady’s,' ‘my dear young man’s,’ one must admit
that there is something which fits in this description.
Yet at the time I speak of, to judge from The Ivory
Tower, The Sense of the Past and some of his letters, he
must in his thoughts have been immersed in a sense of
beauty amounting to a flood of poetry.

And what finally counts are the qualities which one
finds in his books that most obviously spring from the
depths of his own self: his morality, his pity, his humanity,
his feminine genius and feminine courage, his gift of
profound understanding. These qualities are not learnt
from observation, but derived from remoteness, from
journeys far into himself. Yet he has the sane saving
power of observation. The book on America, The American
Scene (written in 1907), which is still one of the best
books on modern America, shows how little he ever
lost this.

If one realizes these two aspects— the observation,
brilliant and external, the emotion, the mature fruit of
the man’s own pity and moral feeling — one will realize
also how profound is his indictment of our civilization in
those three last great novels. The Wings of the Dove, The
Golden Bowl, and The Ambassadors.

Ill

THE UNCONSCIOUS

‘The play of one’s mind,’ reflected Martin Densher, in
the course of one of his terrible interviews with Kate
Croy’s aunt, Mrs. Lowder, ‘gave one away, at the last,
dreadfully in action, in the need for action, where sim-
plicity was all. . . . What he must use his fatal intelligence
for was to resist.’

The fatal intelligence which is the enemy to action is
cast over the three great novels. The Wings of the Dove,
The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl. The result of
it is that the heroes and heroines of these novels are
all passive; they do not act at all; their morality is to
suflFer generously. It also follows that what they have to
suffer from is being more intelligent than the other
characters. Also, there are no villains. It is important to
emphasize this, because in these really savage novels the
behaviour of some of the characters is exposed in its
most brutal form. But the wickedness of the characters
lies primarily in their situation. Once the situation is
provided the actors cannot behave otherwise. Their only
compensation is that by the use of their intelligence, by
their ability to understand, to love, and to suffer, they
may to some extent atone for the evil which is simply
the evil of their modern world. It is these considerations
that make his later books parables of modern Western
civilization.

The plot of each book is based on the development of a
very simple situation. Directly one has fully grasped the

67

68 HENRY JAMES

situation, the revelation of which forms the plot, one
knows what will happen, and part of the interest is to
see how each character gradually learns what the whole
situation is. It is, then, a question of what his attitude
will be to a situation developing as logically as a neurotic
illness, such as paranoia, or as the causes of the European
War were developing, when James wrote this novel.

The situation in The Wings of the Dove is crystallized
by the meeting of Milly, the young, attractive, ill and
orphaned millionairess, with Martin Densher and Kate
Croy. By chance she meets them separately; Martin in
New York, before she comes to Europe, and Kate in
London as soon as she arrives there. It thus happens that
the coincidence of their having already met before she
knew either of them does not force itself on her until very
late in her adventures; especially as they are occupied in
trying to conceal from her that they are lovers.

In the first part of the book — before we meet Milly at
all— there is a whole ‘book’ to impress on us all the circum-
stances of Kate’s and Martin’s love-making. How they
have no money to marry on. How Kate is only saved by
the protection of her aunt, Mrs. Lowder, from being at
the mercy of her scandalous but plausible father who has
committed some unmentionable fraud, and her low,
gossiping sister. The aunt, who rescues her, wishes her
to marry a peer, and will not accept Martin, a vague,
impecunious, interesting, charming journalist of the kind
who is a social correspondent, and who has no prospects.

Milly, on the other hand, is a character of the type
whom Lawrence calls in Aaron's Rod a ‘murderee.’
People who see her and who are disinterested, are touched
by the sense of her doom which she wears. ‘She had the
most extraordinary sense of interesting her guest, in spite
of herself, more than she wanted; it was as if her doom

THE UNCONSCIOUS 69

so floated her on that she couldn’t stop — by very much
the same trick it had played her with the doctor.’

Kate and Martin are the murderers appointed by
nature and the economic system to destroy Milly. As
merciless as vultures, and terrible in their health and
their strong physical passion, they swoop down on her.
That is what the unconscious ordains that they should do.
The interest of the book lies in the play of the intelligence
on this process.

Milly has one way out. When she is ill, she goes to a
doctor, who, by what should have been a stroke of the
greatest fortune, happens to be a psychologist of genius
as great as James himself. He tells her that she has the
power to get well; in order to do so she must choose to live.
In her case, living means that she must have a lover.

It so happens that the person whom Milly has been in
love with, ever since she met him in America, is Martin
Densher. With great courage and simplicity, after she has
seen the doctor, she sets out to marry Martin. Kate now
realizes what is to be Milly’s doom. It is easy for her to
arrange with Martin to conceal their engagement from
Milly, because it is in any case a secret, as it is against
the wishes of Mrs. Lowder, the aunt, who is a con-
fidential friend of the lady companion whom Milly
brings with her from America. But she goes further
than mere concealment; she lets Milly understand that
she dislikes Martin, and that she resents or only tolerates
his attentions, so that Milly not only feels herself more
than ever free, but also anxious to console Martin. Kate
then gets Martin himself involved, by persuading him
to ‘make up’ to Milly, on the pretext that it is useful for
him to do so, since it enables them to have a meeting-
place in Milly’s rooms. It is difficult for them to meet
at Mrs. Lowder’s. One of the worst difficulties of

70 HENRY JAMES

their impoverished courting is that they have nowhere
to go.

The scene shifts to Venice, where Milly takes a palace.
She is now very much in love with Martin, and her
health is so bad, that she is expected to die. Kate now pro-
poses to Martin that he should actually marry Milly, in the
expectation of her dying, and thus gain the money for them
both. He is almost ill with waiting for Kate, who, all this
time, in order to keep the situation keyed up to the highest
pitch, will not sleep with him. However, she promises to
sleep with him if he will agree to her plan, and he agrees.

He lingers on in Venice, visiting Milly every day, and
becoming more and more impressed by her vivid, sensitive
personality. But he does not propose. One day an
admirer of Milly and also of Kate — Lord Mark — arrives,
and tells Milly that Kate and Martin are engaged. Milly
does not believe it. He returns to England, makes quite
certain, goes again to Venice, and this time he convinces
Milly. She turns her face to the wall.

But Milly, after she is dead, still has her beautiful
gesture. She leaves her money, or a great deal of it, to
Martin, and he and Kate know that it is left for them
both. They have got what they wanted. But in the
course of doing so they have been revealed to themselves
and to each other in a light that shows too clearly their real
value, and that destroys love. Martin, in particular, knows
that the really valuable human being is dead, and Kate
knows that he has this knowledge. Yet they themselves
are moral in the sense that they are not cowards. They
are able to face their situation and to recognize the judg-
ment on what has happened. The book ends on this note
when Kate says: ‘We shall never be the same as we were!’

James’s morality is shown here as clearly as possible, in
Milly’s attitude. Her behaviour is made moral by the

THE UNCONSCIOUS 71

extent of her compassionate understanding. What she
understands is not merely that her friends have cheated
her, but that their action is comparatively irrelevant. At
the end of the book it becomes clear that in reality Densher
loves Milly and not Kate, in spite of his extraordinary
calculation. Moreover, in spite of their joint intrigue
Kate and Densher have never the least desire to hurt
Milly. They genuinely believe that she is doomed to die,
and they both want her, until she dies, to be as happy as
possible; or, as Milly sees it, they want, like everyone else
around her, to ‘let her down as gently as possible.’ It is
true that they do not want to give her the love from lack
of which she is dying, but the strange result of their
terrible behaviour is that they do give even this to her.
It is the love which Milly recognizes.

The drama, with its considerable element of horror,
lies in their being conscious of their designs. The book
moves, as it were, on two conflicting planes. The plane of
conscious, social, polite, exquisite appearances, and the
plane of unconscious desires. The peculiarity of these
people is that they have to a quite abnormal degree a
realization of their unconscious motives. In real, every-
day life, most people are subject to fantasies of the ac-
quisitive sort that ruled the lives of Martin and Kate.
Many people act on these fantasies in a quite unscru-
pulous way, without in the least knowing that they are
doing so. For example, few people are able to thwart
the urges of a really strong ambition. The only pecu-
liarity of Martin and Kate, is the degree to which they
allow their designs to become conscious. And by making
them conscious, James was, of course, making them
moral agents. He was distinguishing them from a
society where people act like Kate and Densher; a society
of vultures, wolves, tigers and hogs; but who are living in

72 HENRY JAMES

such a befogged state of moral existence that they are not
in the least conscious of what they are doing.

The next point one notices, is that James, although he is
so passionate an individualist, does not damn Kate and
Martin. What he condemns, by implication, is society.
He regards them as simply the exceptionally conscious
members of a society which is built up, on, and by, people
who behave as they do; and which is so morally blind
that the builders, the empire-builders, the self-made
men, etc., do not know that they are morally dead. This
is again what Milly sees in Densher and Kate, when she
does not judge them by their acts. She judges their acts
as the result of their environment, of their thwarted sexual
happiness, their exceptional beauty and normality. What
she judges them by, is the strange inconsistency of their
intention; the fact that they both let her down so gently;
that Densher does love her; that her generosity will seem
to them appalling.

So Kate and Densher are at one stage of moral con-
sciousness. Like Baudelaire, they are able to be damned.
When Densher half admiringly asks Kate how she can
behave so brutally— ‘What I don’t make out is how, caring
for me, you can like it,’ she replies with a touch of satanic
pride, ‘I don’t like it, but I’m a person, thank goodness,
who can do what I don’t like.’ One can see how that
distinguishes her from the world of good-fellowship and
conferences. She is a human being in the sense that she
has broken away from her sordid home, and is free at
least to behave like an inspired devil.

Since James condemns society and yet is no revolu-
tionary, it follows that for him the individualist is the
only person who is free to do good or evil. For that
reason his virtuous characters, Milly, Strether, and
Maggie Verver, are essentially all isolated and cut off

THE UNCONSCIOUS 73

from their surroundings. They lead a life which is
morally conscious, but which is cut off from the main
stream of contemporary life, and which borders always
very close to death, because they do, in fact, so many of
them, die. Yet they die to avoid the living death of
people who are alive, but dead to all consciousness of moral
values. The evil of society is that it is dead to those
values. In these characters there is always a conflict,
because they are aware that they are shut off from life.
Milly is acutely aware that she ought to have a lover.
Strether that he is now too old to live, Maggie that her
marriage with the prince has failed. All of them put it to
themselves that they have refused something called life.

The structure of the book is very complicated, because
not only does the subject cover a great deal of the past —
of what has happened in Kate’s family before the action
begins — but also the action is centred in different charac-
ters. We move to and fro, sometimes seeing through the
mind of Kate, sometimes of Milly, sometimes of Martin.
In addition to this, we are living in two completely
different worlds, the language of the one being every-
day appearances, the language of the other being some-
times the images of poetry, sometimes dream symbolism.
James does not seem quite clear in this novel as to which
world his characters belong, or rather, which characters
belong to which world. For example, in The Ambassadors^
it is clear that Strether lives in a world quite of his own,
which does not touch even on the world of Chad which
Strether himself imagines to be the world that he is ex-
periencing; that is to say, what he experiences is what he
imagines Chad’s world to be, so that he is living in a world
created by his own imagination and fed by his under-
standing. This world is, in reality, quite different from
Chad’s world, which is the world of a ‘man of the world,’

74 HENRY JAMES

and it is different again from the America of Chad’s
relatives. In The Golden Bowl it is clear that Maggie and
her father speak a language which is quite different from
the language of their sposi. But in The Wings of the Dove
the distinction is not made quite clear. Although Milly
is isolated in her circumstances, she is not sufficiently
isolated in her imagination. Kate, Densher and Lord
Mark all understand her and speak her language only too
well. She is only different from them in that, owing to
her situation, she understands more about all of them
than they do about her, not, as it should be, that her
understanding is of a different quality.

The dream imagery which James uses so freely in his
later novels is all in evidence here. His use of it is to
relate someone’s fantastic picture of his surroundings, with-
out the least transition, exactly as if the fantasy were a
part of reality. The boundary between what is real and
what is fantastic, becomes more and more indistinct,
because, in the artificial lives of these rentiers., it becomes
less and less important; until in The Golden Bowl a climax
is reached where the life of fantasy is more important than
the life of ‘reality.’

An image which describes exactly her psychological
condition is introduced suddenly into a meditation of
Milly ’s after she has visited the doctor. ‘She looked about
her again, on her feet, at her scattered melancholy com-
panions — some of them so melancholy as to be down on
their stomachs in the grass, turned away, ignoring, bur-
rowing.’ It is such plunges into the world of dreams
which are so revealing in James. In their thoughts his
characters are always ‘giving the show away’; the show
that is so gilded and magnificent, its magnificence being
the wealth of a civilization and the tradition of Europe;
and the ‘give away’ being so complete. For what his

THE UNCONSCIOUS

75

characters stoop down and draw up from the unconscious,
is a despair far more overwhelming than their small
private sorrows : the despair of Europe.

The Ambassadors is, in a popular sense, James’s master-
piece. It is not as great a book as The Golden Bowl^ yet it
has the merit of being more readable. The thing in this
book, the object which we hold on to and see from every
angle is Paris. The mission on which Strether, the fifty-
five-year-old New England editor of a green-covered
magazine which keeps up the tone of Woollett, and
which is amply paid for by Mrs. Newsome, is sent to
Paris, is to save Chad Newsome, her son, from an im-
moral life which he has notoriously been leading with
some unknowable woman, and to bring him back to
America to help run his late father’s business. The
business is the manufacture of some unmentionable
article of domestic use. If Strether is successful in pro-
curing Chad, his reward will be marriage with the pros-
perous Mrs. Newsome.

But from the moment of Strether’s first walk in Paris,
the importance of his mission seems to fade to nothing.
Tn the Luxembourg Gardens he pulled up; here at last
he found his nook, and here, on a penny chair from which
terraces, alleys, vistas, fountains, little trees in green
tubs, little women in white caps and shrill little girls at
play all suddenly “composed” together, he passed an
hour in which the cup of his emotions seemed truly to
overflow. But a week had elapsed since he quitted the
ship, and there were more things in his mind than so few
days could account for. More than once during the time
he had regarded himself as admonished, but the ad-
monition this morning was formidably sharp. It took as
it hadn’t done yet the form of a question— the question
of what he was doing with such an extraordinary sense of

76 HENRY JAMES

escape.’ What is happening to him is that the hope of
his youth of what life might mean is suddenly revived.
‘Buried for long years in dark corners, at any rate, these
few germs had sprouted again under forty-eight hours of
Paris.’

When he meets Chad, he finds that Chad does not in
the least resemble the pushing little urchin he had seemed
in America. In fact, he is changed beyond recognition.
He has an air now of being a man of the world, an air of
tact, of distinction, of happiness and gravity. ‘The
change in him was perhaps more than anything else,
for the eye, a matter of the marked streaks of grey,
extraordinary at his age, in his thick black hair; as well
as that this new feature was curiously becoming to him,
did something for him, as characterization, also even —
of all things in the world— as refinement, that had been a
good deal wanted.’

Another germ of his life, hidden in an even darker
corner, now sprouts, because Strether himself has had a
son who died at an early age, a few years after the death
of his own wife. Nevertheless, he conveys, in the frankest
way, his message from ‘the family’ to Chad, and then for
ever leaves it, and waits on in Paris.

What he now realizes is that Chad has the appearance
of having had something prodigious done for him, in the
way of his being quite transformed by some human care.

Then he meets the woman, Madame de Vionnet, and
again he is moved and touched. From now on he accepts
the whole thing, he accepts Chad’s indolence, and the
uncreative gossipy lives of his arty friends, and the fact
that M. de Vionnet is living, and finally the absolute proof
that Madame de Vionnet is Chad’s mistress, a fact which
completely blows up what is left of Woollett in him.

Strether is one of James’s many characters who has

THE UNCONSCIOUS 77

missed life. He has never lived, he has been too passive
ever to put up any fight for life, and now when he realizes
what he has missed, it is too late. The whole book is his
vision of what he has lost, and out of his vision he pas-
sionately takes the side of those whom he imagines to
be, as he sees it, living. To quote from James’s Preface:
‘The whole case, in fine, is in Lambert Strether’s irre-
pressible outbreak to little Bilham on the Sunday after-
noon in Gloriani’s garden, the candour with which he
yields, for his young friend’s enlightenment, to the
charming admonition of that crisis. The idea of the tale
resides indeed in the very fact that an hour of such un-
precedented ease should have been felt by him as a crisis,
and he is at pains to express it for us as neatly as we could
desire. The remarks to which he thus gives utterance
contain the essence of The Ambassadors^ his fingers close,
before he has done, round the stem of the full-blown
flower; which, after that fashion, he continues officiously
to present to us. ‘Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.
It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular so
long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what
have you had.? I’m too old — too old, at any rate, for what
I see. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about
that. Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore
don’t, like me to-day, be without the memory of that
illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too
intelligent to have it, and now I’m a case of reaction
against the mistake. Do what you like as long as you
don’t make it. For it was a mistake. Live, live!’

This was the allusion that was the germ of The Am-
bassadors^ the speech on the part of someone, in just
such a garden as is described in the book, which was
related to James by a friend, as being so remarkable.

Strether is mistaken in his view of the life that the

78 HENRY JAMES

others are leading. He becomes passionately attached to
an idea of their life which is very slightly an anachronism;
he is in love with a conception of history which he has
learnt from the parks and squares of Paris, and not from
the lives of the people round him, although he has em-
bodied an ideal in Chad. Madame de Vionnet easily
makes an ally of him, and he now joins with her in trying
to prevent Chad from crossing the Atlantic.

Whereas Mrs. Newsome, who now sends her daughter
and son-in-law and his sister,— the Pococks,— to Europe,
to replace Strether, has turned on him, Chad treats him
more and more with an amused tolerance. There is more
of Woollett in Chad — and, one suspects, in Paris — than
Strether had imagined. The scene in which Chad shows his
interest in ‘the business’ has in it an element of obscene
horror. Strether has been urging on him that if he forsakes
Madame de Vionnet he would be ‘ “not only, as I say, a
brute; you’d be,’’ his companion went on in the same way,
“a criminal of the deepest dye.’’ ’ Chad protests in the
vein of, ‘ “Of course, I really never forget, night or day,
what I owe her. I owe her everything. I give you my
word of honour,’’ he frankly rang out, “that I’m not a bit
tired of her.’’ Strether at this only gave him a stare
... he spoke of being “tired” of her almost as he might
have spoken of being tired of roast mutton for dinner.’

Chad goes on protesting too much in a light, rather
indifferent, chaffing manner, for some time. ‘But there
was just one thing for which, before they broke off, Chad
seemed disposed slightly to bargain. His companion
needn’t, as he said, tell him, but he might himself men-
tion that he had been getting some news of the art of
advertisement. . . . Advertising scientifically worked pre-
sented itself as the great new force. ‘It really does the
thing, you know.’

THE UNCONSCIOUS 79

‘They were face to face under the street-lamp as they
had been the first night, and Strether, no doubt, looked
blank. “Affects, you mean, the sale of the object ad-
vertised ?”

‘ “Yes — but affects it extraordinarily; really beyond what
one supposed. ... In the hands, naturally, of a master.
The right man must take hold. With the right man to
work it c'est un monde.”

‘Strether had watched him quite as if, there on the
pavement, he had begun to dance a fancy step. . .

With Strether’s impression of ‘an irrelevant hornpipe
or jig* the book seems to wake up with a start from his
wonderful dream. Their various dooms await them. Chad
will go back to Woollett and manage the business and
marry the young American girl, Mamie Pocock, who has
been brought over with her relatives as a bait to tempt
him. Strether is disgraced. He might seem at this stage
to become a completely quixotic, self-deceptive figure,
since he had based his whole belief in life on Chad. But
he is not really deceived. What he has learnt — and what
we have learnt — is that it is Strether himself, and not
Chad, who has, during this amazing six months, lived.
For Strether has realized a fact that Chad experienced and
then rejected. That the life of Woollett and of advertising
is not life at all, but death. That in the gardens and
squares of certain European cities the ghosts of a real life,
not governed by those values, still lurk. And that it is
possible for the young if they rebel against what Woollett
represents, and do not allow themselves grossly to be
bought back, to live.

In this book one notices markedly James’s absolute
refusal to go forward into the world of machinery and
business. It is quite wonderful the way the incursion
of these things breaks the book off, as abruptly as his

8o HENRY JAMES

life work was broken off by the terrible crushing reality
of the War. When the War broke out he gave up writing
The Ivory Tower, and sought relief in returning to the
pure fantasy of The Sense of the Past.

Yet there is a classic of modern literature which is
comparable to The Ambassadors, supposing James had
dealt with the side of modern life, of the great city, of
Paris even, which he so definitely rejects. That book is
James Joyce’s Ulysses.

There is a remarkable similarity in the setting of the
two books. The object in Ulysses which compares with
the use of Paris in The Ambassadors is Dublin; it is the
presence, with all its movement and traffic and all its
ghosts, of a great town. The difiFerence is that Joyce has
described in Dublin everything that James left out of
Paris: the whores, the dirt, the military, the low life. An
involved compact little Jew, whose brain crawls with
undeveloped romantic and scientific ideas, like larvae of
insects, the products of a half-educated age, wanders
through Dublin, just as Strether walked, or was driven
rather more stylishly, through Paris. Like Strether,
Bloom has lost an only son at a very early age, and he
transfers his hope and affection on a young man, Stephen
Daedalus.

The method of Joyce’s book is also an extension of the
Jamesian method. James invented the technique of
following always the thoughts of his characters; of seeing
each character through the other characters, and of
revealing the stream of monologue in which each character
addresses to himself his hidden thoughts. This is also the
method of Ulysses, although here, as in other respects,
Joyce has extended the principle right to its logical con-
clusion.

Comparing the books, one is at once aware of a certain

THE UNCONSCIOUS 8i

evasion in The Ambassadors. James has avoided the
shocking revelations of his method of exploring the minds
of his characters, by exercising a strict censorship over
their thoughts. But one may suspect that his style was
leading him Joycewards, when one reflects how much
broader is the outlook of The Ambassadors than that of the
earlier books.

The danger of the method of the interior monologue
(or whatever it has been branded) is that it may fall com-
pletely into chaos. For the unconscious is the chaos of
unexpressed and uncontrolled desires and emotions, and
the danger is that of simply reflecting the unexpressed.
We shall see that there is an element of chaos even in the
wonderfully organized variations of The Golden Bowl-,
and Ulysses, in spite of its incredible technical accomplish-
ment, is also on the verge of it. In The Wings of the Dove
and The Ambassadors, it is avoided, partly because the action
is never far removed from the conscious plane. In the
first section of Ulysses the balance of conscious and un-
conscious is achieved, but I think it is true to say that
the last three-quarters of the book are all in the W alpurgis-
nacht mood, although Joyce has rather ingeniously con-
cealed this by making the dramatic section so obviously
resemble the corresponding scene in Goethe’s Faust that
one does not notice the persistence of this similarity
in all the later settings. However, as an artistic whole,
Ulysses is obviously less complete than The Golden Bowl,
although it contains an even greater artistry. The opening
is too realistic, and all Joyce’s technical devices do not
succeed in concealing the fundamental monotony of
style, thought, content, action, and characterization.
The characters seem hardly worked into the book at
all. Although Marion Tweedy Bloom and Leopold
are man and wife, the parts allotted to them divide the

82 HENRY JAMES

book into great hunks which fall apart in the memory.
Bloom is magnificent, and most magnificent of all is
Marion Tweedy’s monologue which forms the last
section of the book. But Stephen is so disastrous a failure
that he is only recognizable at all by being made in-
separable from his ashplant.^ The large conception of
the book creatse a sense of size beside which James’s
books seem small, but unfortunately Joyce’s own
characters are drowned in their environment.

In The Ambassadors^ James avoids the danger of the
monologue falling over into chaos by making Strether’s
thought entirely spiritual. Strether’s mind is almost
incapable of apprehending isolated facts. He lives in a
perfect Spinozan universe of life, each single part of
which is a little mirror that reflects the whole. The cafif
with its tables set out on the pavement is Paris, and Paris
is life. Woollett is death. Chad, too, is only acceptable
because he is life, and, because he is life, Strether accepts
even the fact that he is living with Madame de Vionnet;
in fact, he gets a kick out of it. Anything which he cannot
accept, destroys the unity which he sees reflected in all his
little mirrors. In this way the book, like an immense
silver sphere, or a hanging candelabrum of prismatic
crystals, proceeds beautifully and smoothly to be built up
to its climax, when Chad dances his obscene little jig and
smashes everything, except Strether’s own inner world,
to smithereens. The difficulty is that the book, in spite
of its seriousness, has an air of unreality. We sympathize
with Strether, but it is possible to regard him— as does
one of the young critics in Hound and Horn James
number— as being pathetic, which, of course, is to destroy
the book’s whole meaning. The truth is that Strether
rejects Woollett in favour of Paris too completely. He
* See Wyndham Lewis’s Time and Western Man.

THE UNCONSCIOUS 83

fails to sec that there is also something of Woollett in
modern Paris; that in order even to accept Paris he has
got somehow to make a synthesis which includes a great
deal of the original Woollett.

In Ulysses verbal chaos (as apart from artistic chaos, of
which there is plenty) is avoided, by a device which is the
exact converse of that in The Ambassadors. The whole of
the thought is symbolized by objects. The dream imagery
used by James to some extent in The Wings of the Dove
and to a large extent in The Golden Bowl (but not at all in
The Ambassadors.^ in which the imagery is always poetic)
is used throughout. But the dream is always absolutely
without censorship, and Bloom’s half-penitent reflexion
that ‘sleep reveals the worst side of one’ might be taken
as a comment on the whole book. To some extent the
greater freedom of expression in Joyce, is to be accounted
for, not so much by James’s prudishness, as by the different
subject-matter of his book. For James is describing people
who are far more repressed than the Dubliners in Ulysses.
It is natural that a James character should not think in
terms of phalluses, but of ivory towers, beautiful lakes,
pagodas and golden bowls. Nevertheless this does not
account for a certain ambiguity in his own attitude; for
one’s feeling is that he identified himself with his repressed
characters to an extent that sometimes belies his studiedly
conscious artistic method.

Ulysses is an extremely learned book, which contains a
mass of connotation. Bloom is immensely informed in a
half-baked sort of way, but, in being so, he is far more
like his author, and the majority of modern authors, than
one at first imagines. For Joyce also has Bloom’s habit
of endless fragmentary connotation, which one finds also
in Baudelaire and in Eliot. Bloom’s mind is, in fact, a
parody of the modern literary or scientific mind. He has a

84 HENRY JAMES

gift for scientific allusion, and erudition of a kind which
delights in puns, private jokes, and the use of a language
heightened by the mixture of four or five other languages.

So the knowingness of Bloom extends far beyond him-
self, and positively floods the book. Also Joyce’s descrip-
tions nearly always relate the object described to the
immense heap of personalia, of private association which
makes up his world; for example, the ‘snot-green sea.’
His book has a weakness, which is the opposite of the
spirituality of The Ambassadors', the factual realism is
so strong, that it is not balanced sufficiently by any
emotional qualities large enough to reach beyond their
association with particular objects which excite our disgust
or pleasure.

Joyce’s poems, his short stories, and A Portrait of the
Artist as a Toung Man., show us where he fails most. In
the poems there is an unexpected tendency to senti-
mentality and prettiness. In A Portrait of the Artist this
sentimentality assumes the inverted form of a rather
adolescent pleasure in the disgusting: physical desire
and many physical processes are considered sinful and
therefore disgusting, and because they are disgusting,
therefore exciting and desirable.

This may explain why so many readers of Ulysses (even
so admiring a critic as Professor Ernst Robert Curtius)
have insisted that finally it leaves in the mouth a taste of
dust and ashes, although the most persistent note of the
book is one of geniality. It contains humour of a kind
which has practically disappeared from literature, and
which certainly one does not find in English since Swift.
This humour is only consistent with the greatest possible
underlying seriousness, and the difficulty is that the
humour itself is not, in a sense, serious enough. That is
to say, firstly, it does not extend widely enough to enclose

THE UNCONSCIOUS 85

the whole theme. Each joke stands by itself, and the
many jokes have the air of being a constantly repeated
variation on one joke, not parts of one gigantic, inclusive
joke. Secondly, when we come to Stephen and his ash-
plant, in spite of the most strenuous and erudite efforts,
the joke breaks down; Stephen is pedantic and ponderous,
and it is impossible to take him as seriously as Bloom,
and therefore impossible to be funny about him. Thirdly,
the humour is strained, because, like the character of
Stephen, the book itself seems often to be forced, almost
to breaking-point. The author seems determined, at
whatever cost, to write a masterpiece, which, however
much it may be distorted and broken up, is yet com-
pletely in the tradition of Madame Bovary and all the
classics. So that the book wears a thick surface polish,
and one is made on every page to realize that, however
disrupted the separate parts may seem, they do all in
some intricate and secret way fit together and conform
to a pattern, the key to which may be found in The
Odyssey. The book is made complete in itself, with no
loose ends; in fact, the finale is made as decisive and
emphatic as possible. A great hunk of prose is written,
which ends off the book like a massive stone monolith.
This attempt at a forced perfection seems to me an error
of taste, as gross as that of making Stephen a writer.
It illustrates James’s immense superiority as an artist, to
reflect that his last books do not aim at a completion to
compare with Ulysses. The end of The Wings of the Dove,
although it kills Milly, only brings us back to another
beginning. The book starts off with a description of the
relationship of Kate and Martin, and it ends with a slight
modification of that relationship which gives it a ‘fresh
start.’ The Golden Bowl ends also with a new beginning;
it describes the termination of Maggie’s ‘marriage’ with

86 HENRY JAMES

her father, and it opens out on to another unwritten
volume which would describe the married life of Char-
lotte and Mr. Verver in America. The Ambassadors
breaks off at the point where a new and fascinating book
might describe Strether’s life alone, after he had been
forsaken by Chad and Mrs. Newsome. It is part of
James’s method to allow his books gently to flow into the
life around us. It is interesting to reflect that his books
always end at the point where the action of his characters
becomes most credible ; having explained how these
exceptional cases do fit into the life which we all know,
he leaves us with them, and them with us.

Ulysses fails then as comidie humaine. As tragedy, it is
too studied, and the use of the corpse in the play scene
brings with it a strong whiff of stage settings in grand
opera.

Apart from the humour, the strongest emotion in
Ulysses is an overpowering sense of sin. It is perhaps
this which made T. S. Eliot remark in After Strange
Gods that ‘the most ethically orthodox of the more
eminent writers of my time is Mr. Joyce,’ and, again,
that his work is ‘penetrated with Christian feeling.’ We
are dealing here, of course, with a side of Christianity
which has nothing to do with Christ. For there is no
evidence that Christ had a fascinated sense of the wicked-
ness of the body; and it is this physical obsession which
permeates Ulysses. Sin and death are all that is left of
the Church even. There is no belief in salvation; that
has been thrown overboard by Stephen in A Portrait of
the Artist\ only a nightmare vision of a world smelling
with the dregs of a hated Catholicism, endless sin and
no salvation. This feeling is so strong that it destroys
every other feeling. Compared with it, Bloom’s little
sentiments of pity and love for his dead son are ridiculous.

THE UNCONSCIOUS 87

And Marion Tweedy’s strong physical passions are torn
away from the rest of the book.

I now turn to The Ambassadors^ The Wings of the Dove
and The Golden Bowl which represent a return to the
‘International Scene’ of the earlier novels. But The Golden
Bowl forms also a synthesis with the novels of the middle
period, such as The Awkward Age and The Sacred Fount,
in which the pattern is particularly emphasized.

The Golden Bowl is extremely simplified, because there
are only four main characters and two subsidiary choric
figures, and no one else is of the slightest importance.
The key to the situation is the fact that there are, in effect,
before the action begins, two original groupings. Maggie
is the companion of her father, Mr. Verver, and they
live together in their relationship always gaily referred
to as their marriage. Meanwhile, unknown to them, their
two future sfosi — as they are always called— Amerigo,
the prince, and Charlotte, an adventurous, moneyless,
‘wonderful’ friend of Maggie, are having their little affair.
The leading choric character, Mrs. Assingham, now steps
in and breaks up the grouping from AB, CD— Maggie,
Mr. Verver; the Prince, Charlotte; into AC, BD. The
prince marries Maggie. Maggie is now deeply conscious
of the loneliness of her father, and her father is also
conscious that her concern for him may not be best for
her marriage. Meanwhile Charlotte returns from America,
and, just before the wedding, she walks through Mayfair
with the prince, where, in a curio shop, they look at the
golden bowl with a flaw in it, which they discuss, but
decide not to buy, for Maggie’s wedding present. After
the marriage, Charlotte stays with the Ververs, and then
Mr. Verver takes her to Brighton, and proposes to her.
They marry, and soon after the marriage, the prince and
Charlotte start living together. Thus, after a transition.

88 HENRY JAMES

in which the figures are AC, BD, we return to the original
order AB, CD. The dramatic climax of the book is
Maggie’s passionate fight to restore the order of the
marriages, which she at last succeeds in doing. Thus the
book falls into this sort of pattern: —

{Spectators ): — AB CD

The Golden Bowl

The major and AC BD The major and

Fanny Assingham AB CD Fanny Assingham

The Golden Bowl
AC BD

This symmetry symbolizes the social order.

The golden bowl with its flaw represents, of course,
the flaw in the order of their lives.

The moral problem in the book is extremely important.
It is not merely a struggle between the injured and duped
father and child and the strident aristocratic sensual
lovers, who are living on the money of the weaker
couple, which would resemble the situation of The Wings
of the Dove. There is a far deeper conflict, between the
two kinds of marriage, the spiritual and the platonic.
Maggie will not abandon her father: the injury done
to the sposi is that the marriages have been arranged —
Maggie’s in part, Mr. Verver’s entirely — simply in order
to improve the relationship of the father and daughter.
Mrs. Assingham, who arranges the first marriage, knows
that in providing his daugher with a prince, she is also
providing Mr. Verver with an invaluable ‘piece’ for his
collection. Moreover, the father and daughter agree that
their life is too closed-in, too selfish, that they see too
little of the world, that they are altogether lacking in free
air and large experience, and Maggie’s marriage presents
an excellent way out.

THE UNCONSCIOUS 89

Both marriages having been made, the father and
daughter continue to see a good deal of each other, so it
follows that stepmother and son-in-law are also thrown
together. Moreover, the platonic relationship of the
daughter and father not only competes with the relation-
ship of Charlotte and Amerigo, it also affects a third con-
current relationship, which is the sexual life of each party
with his or her marriage partner. The platonicism of the
father and daughter evidently creeps into their marriages.
Charlotte suffers most from this, because her husband is
in any case an old man; and although the suggestion that
he is wonderfully young is bravely kept up— it becomes
part of the system of the book— he cannot have a child.
Maggie has a child— the Principino— but she does not
satisfy her pleasure-loving Italian husband. He is
politely but infinitely bored by the Ververs. Finally,
Maggie is passionately and deeply in love with the prince :
like Cordelia, she recognizes that her love for her husband
is deeper even than that for her father; to that extent the
marriage is not in the least a marriage of convenience.

Thus the moral problem much more decisively demands
an answer in this than in any other book of James.
Maggie is not in the position of Milly or Strether, who
have only to live according to their lights, and then to
lose everything. In James’s other books he has convinced
us that a part of life, of the real life of a human being, as
apart from the performance of an automaton, is the power
to choose to die. Milly is only one of the many tens of
characters who choose to die. The question James has
not yet answered is whether it is possible in the modern
world to choose to live : and Maggie triumphantly answers
it for him.

Her answer takes her far beyond the aesthetics of
behaviour, although, like all James’s characters, she is

90 HENRY JAMES

deeply concerned with these. She lives and saves the
situation by the force of her patience, her generosity and
her love. Twice she affirms a faith that is also her policy.
Once to Mrs. Assingham, who, being the original match-
maker, unifies the sense of moral responsibility which
weighs on all the characters.

‘Maggie thoughtfully shook her head. “No; I’m not
terrible, and you don’t think me so. I do strike you as
surprising, no doubt — but surprisingly mild. Because—
don’t you see.?— I am mild. I can bear anything.’’

‘ “Oh, ‘bear’! ’’ Mrs. Assingham fluted.

‘ “For love,’’ said the Princess.

‘Fanny hesitated. “Of your father?”

‘ “For love,” Maggie repeated.

‘It kept her friend watching. “Of your husband?”

‘ “For love,” Maggie said again.’

Once more, at the end of the book, Maggie reaffirms
her declaration, this time to her father, when in their
most wonderful confabulation the father and daughter,
without ever betraying their loyalty to their marriages,
or revealing to each other their knowledge of the intrigue
between Charlotte and the prince, reveal only, indeed,
their anxious tenderness for each other, their unshaken
belief in each other, and that their understanding went
deeper than anything which they need say.

‘My idea is this, that when you only love a little you’re
naturally not jealous— or are only jealous also a little, so
that it doesn’t matter. But when you love in a deeper
and intenser way, then you are, in the same proportion,
jealous; your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity.
When, however, you love in the most abysmal and un-
utterable way of all— why, then you’re beyond everything,
and nothing can pull you down.’

The scene of The Golden Bowl is the most ambitious

THE UNCONSCIOUS 91

he ever attempted, and the first half of the book, allotted
to the prince, does really little more than construct the
vast stage on which his drama is enacted. That stage is
set in England, but upon it meet America and Italy.
Italy is represented by Amerigo, so that his ancestry
recalls the greatness and the crimes of the Empire.
America, with all its wealth and all its innocence, is Adam
Verver and his daughter.

Set against this great historical and geographical
tradition, there is the strangely insulated, shut-off life of
the actors. The two married couples, on this immense
stage, in their admired and plausible surroundings, are
yet living a life which is grotesquely at odds with their
happy setting of envied appearances, and unsuited to the
standards of the tradition to which they are trying to
conform. They are perpetually at the edge of something
quite sordid: of the divorce court, the reported evidence
of servants, and love-letters printed in the news. The
struggle of the Ververs is a struggle to make the picture
fit the frame; they are constantly struggling to make their
lives worthy of their dead surroundings.

They are handicapped in this endeavour by two psycho-
logical difficulties. The first is that the Ververs are
absorbed in their own private life, whereas the people
they marry are, in a modern, almost in a journalistic,
sense, suited to the public life. The Ververs are a
lovable, cosy pair of very simple, very clever people who
are immensely rich. It is emphasized throughout the
book that everything about them is, by mere contrast
with their huge setting, very small. Their virtues are a
human understanding which does not extend beyond the
individuals immediately around them, an immense per-
sonal tenderness, and a love which hardly reaches further
than each other and the pair whom they marry. The

92 HENRY JAMES

word ‘small’ is constantly associated with Maggie, and
it is she who in one of her moments of greatest exaltation
realizes that her father was ‘simply a great and deep
and high little man, and that to love him with tenderness
was not to be distinguished, a whit, from loving him with
pride.’ One remembers him always, with his dim smile,
his quiet, very youthful manner, in the unassuming little
scene; gazing at a ‘piece’ in his collection, or wandering
vaguely about his garden. On the other hand, everything
about Charlotte and the prince is on the grand scale.
As Maggie says when she recommends Charlotte to her
father, ‘I may be as good, but I’m not so great— and
that’s what we’re talking about. She has a great imagina-
tion. She has, in every way, a great attitude. She has
above all a great conscience.’

Secondly, Charlotte, being so great, consistently under-
estimates Maggie’s intelligence. It is then this failure of
Charlotte’s own intelligence which produces the crack in
their situation which requires so much understanding and
courage to repair. In James’s world, a failure of intelligence
—that is to say, of intelligence in life— may amount to a
moral failing. But Maggie’s behaviour shows that it does
not follow that intelligence alone is morality: for it is
Maggie’s love that saves the marriages.

What most lives in one’s memory of The Golden Bowl
is the pattern of monologue contrasted with certain un-
forgettable scenes. Especially a few of the scenes, such
as the ironic scene in which the prince and Charlotte meet
on their vow to care for his wife and her husband.

‘ “It’s sacred,’’ he said at last.

‘ “It’s sacred,’’ she breathed back to him. They vowed
it, gave it out and took it in, drawn, by their intensity,
more closely together. Then of a sudden, through this
tightened circle, as at the issue of a narrow strait into the

THE UNCONSCIOUS 93

sea beyond, everything broke up, broke down, gave way,
melted and mingled. Their lips sought their lips, their
pressure their response and their response their pressure;
with a violence that had sighed itself the next moment
to the longest and deepest of stillnesses they passionately
sealed their pledge.’

Again, there is the scene in the carriage, where Maggie
tries to protest to her husband, and when she detects how
he uses his sensuality to silence her: ‘He put his arm
round her and drew her close— indulged in the demon-
stration, the long, firm embrace by his single arm, the
infinite pressure of her whole person to his own, that such
opportunities had so often suggested and prescribed.’

But the most extraordinary scenes of all, are those with
Charlotte at the end of the book. They follow on that
very remarkable climax when Mrs. Assingham deliberately
throws down and smashes the golden bowl, which Maggie
has accidentally bought from the shop in Mayfair: and
bought with it, too, the knowledge that Charlotte and her
husband were deeply intimate before her marriage. The
prince comes into the room, and just because he is let off
having to explain, he learns all the more clearly that
Maggie knows, has always known, and also that she does
not require any explanation. This is the first step in his
conversion to Maggie, and he marks it by not telling
Charlotte that Maggie knows: thus Charlotte is in the
dark, and Maggie and the prince are together, as it were,
in the light of Maggie’s generosity. The ground is thus
elaborately prepared for the description of that terrible
evening when Charlotte, ‘the splendid shining supple
creature was out of the cage, was at large.’ James is at
his most prodigious in the description of the meeting of
the two women, and of the high spirit with which Maggie
tells her wonderful lie, denying that Charlotte has done

94 HENRY JAMES

her any injury, and thus keeping her compact of silence
with the prince. ‘They were together thus, he and she,
close, close together— whereas Charlotte, though rising
there radiantly before her, was really off in some darkness
of space that would steep her in solitude and harass her
with care.’ But the scene ends with Charlotte’s triumph,
for the nature of Maggie’s victory is precisely in letting
Charlotte enjoy her own value, which is greatly to triumph.
On this occasion the triumph is in the form of a public
embrace: ‘But there was something different also, some-
thing for which, while her cheek received the prodigious
kiss, she had her opportunity — the sight of the others,
who, having risen from their cards to join the absent
members of their party, had reached the open door at
the end of the room and stopped short, evidently, in
presence of the demonstration that awaited them.’

This scene, as though it demands an encore, is followed
by a parallel scene in the daytime, when Maggie goes out
into the garden on the excuse of taking Charlotte a book
which she had forgotten. Here again the patient and
loving resolve of Mr. Verver, who has now played his part
in deciding that he and Maggie must separate and that
he must go with his wife to America, is made part of
Charlotte’s indignant triumph.

These scenes, in their vast, resonant setting, and ex-
tending into variations in Maggie’s thought, have the air
of those surrialiste paintings in which one islanded,
accurate object, perhaps a house, or a fragment of ruined
stone wall, is seen against an empty background which
seems perhaps to be the whole sea, or the whole sky, or
the whole of space.

For the monologues dip over into an abyss where they
become part of the unconscious mind of Europe. They
are written in a language in which one loses oneself among

THE UNCONSCIOUS 95

imagery which is poetry, but which has not the rhythm
or the diction of a writer who is completely a poet. The
particular effects in The Golden Bowl fail; but the total
effect of the book is as striking as the third movement —
the Heiliger Dankgesang — of Beethoven’s Quartet in
A Minor, Opus 1 30. In that movement, the drawn-out,
religious harmonies are contrasted with the two islands
of feverish dramatic ecstasy, which they enclose, like an
endless, calm sea.

Throughout The Golden Bowl the descriptive passages
deliberately suggest vast spaces opening out into mystery
and vagueness. ‘This love of music, unlike his other
loves, owned to vaguenesses, but, while, on his compara-
tively shaded sofa, and smoking, smoking, always smoking,
in the great Fawns drawing-room as everywhere, the
cigars of his youth, rank with associations— while, I say,
he so listened to Charlotte’s piano, where the score was
never absent, but, between the lighted candles, the
picture distinct, the vagueness spread itself about him
like some boundless carpet, a surface delightfully soft to
the pressure of his interest.’ Here Mr. Verver is set like
a little island against his sea of vagueness.

It is from this deliberately conjured atmosphere that
there arise, as from the depths, the dream images of the
unconscious. Too often these images, not being ordered
by metric, almost overwhelm the reader, swamping all
other associations, and making him forget the story.
‘She might fairly, as she watched them, have missed it as
a lost thing: have yearned for it, for the straight vindictive
view, the rights of resentment, the rages of jealousy, the
protests of passion, as for something she had been cheated
of not least: a range of feelings which for many women
would have meant so much, but which for her husband’s
wife, for her father’s daughter, figured nothing nearer to

96 HENRY JAMES

experience than a wild eastern caravan, looming into
view with crude colours in the sun, fierce pipes in the air,
high spears against the sky, all a thrill, a natural joy to
mingle with, but turning off short before it reached her
and plunging into other defiles.' Before we have fully
recovered, in the same paragraph, Maggie has another
vision ; one which, in the story, is of far greater significance
than the first, because of the light in which it presents
Charlotte: ‘She saw at all events why horror itself had
almost failed her; the horror that, foreshadowed in advance,
would, by her thought, have made everything that was
unaccustomed in her cry out with pain; the horror of
finding evil seated, all at its ease, where she had dreamed
only of good; the horror of the thing hideously behind^
behind so much trusted, so much pretended, nobleness,
cleverness, tenderness.’

It is the feeling of horror, of foreboding before some
calamity, that never fails, and that sometimes produces a
poetry so pure and so dreadfully true of our whole
situation, that it reaches far beyond the ‘small despair’
of the Ververs. One such passage occurs in the scene
between Maggie and Fanny Assingham, just after
Maggie has bought the golden bowl. Fanny conceals
what she knows from Maggie, for to relax the tension in
Maggie’s spirit would be the signal for her to collapse
and despair: what she knows about her husband she has
to learn through her own suffering, so that she learns also
the way out. ‘Though ignorant still of what she had
definitely met, Fanny yearned, within, over her spirit;
and so, no word about it said, passed, through mere
pitying eyes, a vow to walk ahead and, at cross roads, with
a lantern for the darkness and wavings away for unadvised
traffic, look out for alarms.’

It is such passages in James, which in their use of

THE UNCONSCIOUS

97

imagery derived from everyday life, predict the best in
modern poetry. But the feeling of a horror that is entirely
modern, is emphasized even more strongly, in the passages
which describe the mental suffering of Maggie. When
Maggie first tries to explain her position to Mrs. Assing-
ham, she says: ‘If I’m jealous — don’t you see.? — I’m tor-
mented, and all the more if I’m helpless. And if I’m both
helpless and tormented I stuff my pocket-handkerchief
into my mouth, I keep it there, for the most part, night
and day, so as not to be heard too indecently moaning.’

Nor is this account of her torture any mere figure of
speech. In her great scene with Charlotte, when Charlotte
had triumphed, we are told: ‘Oh, the “advantage,” it was
perfectly enough, in truth, with Mrs. Verver; for what
was Maggie’s own sense but that of having been thrown
over on her back, with her neck, from the first, half broken
and her helpless face staring up.?’ Maggie suffocates, she
has for ever the sense of ‘the beast at her throat.’

Nor is it only Maggie who endures these horrors. They
pursue Charlotte, and one of the really terrifying moments
is the description of Charlotte’s lecture to some visitors
on her husband’s collection.

‘ . . . “The largest of these three pieces has the rare
peculiarity that the garlands, looped round it, which, as
you see, are the finest possible vieux Saxe . . .” ’ etc., etc.

‘So the high voice quavered, aiming truly at effects far
over the heads of gaping neighbours . . . Maggie mean-
while, at the window, knew the strangest thing to be
happening: she had turned suddenly to crying, or was at
least on the point of it— the lighted square before her all
blurred and dim. The high voice went on; its quaver
was doubtless for conscious ears only, but there were
verily thirty seconds during which it sounded, for our
young woman, like the shriek of a soul in pain.’

98 HENRY JAMES

The horror then pursues the prince: he has his own
agonized way of sitting in his room and reading the news-
papers, Figaro and The Times.

When one considers these examples, one begins to feel
certain that beneath the stylistic surface, the portentous
snobbery, the golden display, of James’s work, there lurk
forms of violence and chaos. His technical mastery has
the perfection of frightful balance and frightful tension :
beneath the stretched out compositions there are abysses
of despair and disbelief: Ulysses and The IVaste Land.

What after all do these images of suffocation, of broken
necks, of wailing, suggest but a collection of photographs
of the dead and wounded during the Great War? We
remember his phrase, made in 1915: ‘to have to take it
all now for what the treacherous years were all the while
really making for and meaning., is too tragic for any words.’

IV

THE IVORY TOWER AND THE SENSE
OF THE PAST

X HE two last, posthumously published, novels of Henry
James, The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past^ both
of which are unfinished, are in several ways completely
different from any of the books that form the Collected
Edition. The Ivory Tower is a novel with an American
setting and an entirely contemporary subject. One may
say of all James’s other novels, even of the latest, that their
characters could easily fit into the last generation of the
nineteenth century. Butin 1907 James visited America,
and it is easy to see from The American Scene that this
visit stimulated him greatly, and made him aware of the
existence of a ‘younger generation’ which he had never
yet described, and about which he was deeply curious.

His characters are equipped with plenty of ‘modern’
symptoms. The first one we meet, Rosanna Gaw, smokes
like a chimney. One of her confidants, Davey Bradham,
is a typically travelled and experienced American of
to-day, who might almost be labelled a ‘tough.’ ‘But
for his half-a-dozen wrinkles, as marked as the great
rivers of a continent on a map, and his thick and arched
and active eyebrows, which left almost nothing over for
his forehead, he would have scarce exhibited features —
in spite of the absence of which, however, he could look
in alternation the most portentous things and the most
ridiculous. He would hang up a meaning in his large
empty face as if he had swung an awful example on a

99

100 HENRY JAMES

gibbet, or would let loose there a great grin that you
somehow couldn’t catch in the fact, but that pervaded his
expanses of cheek as poured wine pervades water.’

The portraits of the characters, of Rosanna, the full,
calm, sympathetic daughter of the wrinkled old million-
aire, Mr. Gaw, who dies in a fit of pique because he
wrongly believes that his crony, Betterman, is going to
recover from an illness; of Graham and of his friend
Horton, are so closely observed as to be almost photo-
graphic. There are scenes, such as the conversation of
the dying Mr. Betterman with his nephew Graham, at the
party at Mrs. Bradham’s, which have as essentially the
stamp of richest America as the most expensive pro-
ductions of Hollywood. Every page of the book bears
evidence that James had sharply turned back to the outer
world, to the thing annotated and made use of, to the
picture of life that was essentially modern.

In the character of the hero, Graham, James has, as he
often did before, with Coleridge or Browning or Shelley,
taken an enduring type of character, and watched his
behaviour in a modern environment. Graham is the most
successful of these experiments. On one occasion his type
is revealed, when Horton Vint describes him as looking
like ‘a happy Hamlet.’ I think there is no doubt that
James was trying to ‘do’ Hamlet in modern dress.

Like Hamlet, Graham is consciously out of place; he is
a sincere man who finds himself in a world in which he is
compelled, self-consciously, to play a part. He has his
confessor, Horton, who does not understand him, and
who effectively betrays him. Horton is a kind of corrupt
Horatio— a modern Horatio would of course be corrupt;
a business man, in fact— who, although he cheats Graham,
feels passionately towards him. Graham confesses,
typically: ‘The extent, Vinty, to which I think I must just

THE IVORY TOWER loi

like to drift.’ He is full of doubts as to the reality of his
own feelings. In the course of the same conversation
about drifting, Horton suggests to him that he may be
afraid. ‘ “Afraid.? Am I afraid?” Graham fairly spoke
with a shade of the hopeful, as if even that would be
richer somehow than drifting.’ But the most remarkable
of these references is an image which is an unconscious
echo of Shakespeare. Horton is chiding Gray, as Graham
is familiarly called, for his evasion of the social life that
should accompany his wealth: ‘ “Of course you may dig
the biggest hole in the ground that ever was dug —
spade-work comes high, but you’ll have the means— and
get down into it and sit at the very bottom. Only your
hole will become then the feature of the scene, and we
shall crowd a thousand deep all round the edge of it.” ’

Not only does this image directly recall ‘Ossa like a
wart,’ and the burial scene in Hamlet^ but the conceit is
Shakespearean. To most readers, a difficulty in the
style of James’s later books, is that the images are
poetic and do not naturally belong to prose.

If Gray is a modern Hamlet, he is also a connexion of
Maggie and Milly and Strether. His life is, in fact, a
development of theirs, just as his surroundings are also
an extension of theirs into ‘the rotten state of Denmark.’
In the notes for the book James confesses to the resem-
blances, ‘All of which makes him, I of course, desperately
recognize, another of the “intelligent,” another exposed
and assaulted, active and passive “mind” engaged in an
adventure and interested in itself by so being.’

The peculiar interest of Gray is that, unlike the other
‘minds,’ he does not accept a r61e which is forced on him,
but, finding himself out of place, he invents a r6le for
himself, and, like Hamlet, he toys constantly with the
idea of positive, consistent action, but does not altogether

102 HENRY JAMES

indulge in it. His attitude to action is not weak, but
neurotic and perverse. He rejects the opportunity to
read a letter to him exposing his uncle, written by Mr.
Gaw on his death-bed; but he does not destroy the letter,
he merely preserves it in an ivory tower. He refuses to
take any action when he discovers that his friend Vinty,
whom he has made manager of all his affairs, is cheating
him : nor does he decide to let Vinty off. He is, in a word,
self-absorbed to a degree which makes him quite unlike
the unselfish Milly and Maggie and Strether. He is
intensely interested in life as he sees it. Fundamentally
he can always rely on the fact that he is indifferent, and
that, just because he is so indifferent, the feelings of other
people towards him, even of Haughty, are passionate. He
is profoundly serious, but he is too disillusioned to take
human relationship seriously.

It is possible for Maggie to be almost destroyed by the
prince and Charlotte, because she believes that finally
they are capable of being moved by, and responding to
her love. Her love is not wasted. Gray feels that love is
wasted. He is overwhelmed by the sense of social corrup-
tion, which seems to rob the lives of the people around
him of all moral significance. This is also an aspect of
Hamlet’s character; Hamlet is introspective because he is
isolated; his speeches are mostly soliloquies, because there
is no one to whom he could say them: his surroundings
are a mirror in which his gestures are merely reflected:
the world of moral drama has to be created in his own
soul.

The world of The Ivory Tower, in which James made a
special effort to use the ‘thing observed’: in which he
completes, as it were, the circle of his life’s artistic achieve-
ment, and returns to what I have called the ‘School of
Experience’ : this world is quite shamelessly corrupt. Its

THE IVORY TOWER 103

legend is the remark which Mr. Betterman makes to
Graham on his death-bed: ‘The enormous preponderance
of money. Money is their life.’ Davey Bradham remarks
on one occasion, ‘Of course, we are all incredibly corrupt.’
And, in the course of a very frank conversation with
Cissy, the girl whom, if either of them had money, he
might marry, Horton Vint makes a remark which is
sufficiently a comment on his ‘type’ and on his relation-
ship with Gray. ‘The dream of my life, if you must know
all, dear — the dream of my life has been to be admired,
really admired, admired for all he’s worth, by some
awfully rich man.’

The behaviour and even the appearance of the characters
is suited to this tune : Cissy’s relationship with Gray im-
proves when she — quite uncritically — feels that Horton is
absorbing Gray’s income. No one in the book seems older
than thirty, and they nearly all behave as if they were
eighteen: the dazzling sense of their youth is over-
shadowed by the enormous accumulation of the wealth
on which they are living, and the terrible deaths of the
two old men, surrounded by their doctors and nurses.

This book is extremely important in its relation to the
rest of James’s work, because it shows, to the point of a
final consistency, his view of the modern world. It paints
a picture of Hell unmitigated by aesthetic delights. The
relationships which were possible to Strether and Maggie
are denied to Gray, and he has not even the faith to be an
artist. ‘Heaven forbid he should “paint”— but there
glimmers before me the sense of the connection in which
I can see him as more or less covertly and waitingly,
fastidiously and often too sceptically, conscious of possi-
bilities of “writing.” Quite frankly accept the compli-
cation or whatever of his fastidiousness, yet of his
recognition withal of what makes for sterility. . . . His

104 HENRY JAMES

“ culture,” his initiations of intelligence and experience,
his possibilities of imagination, if one will, to say nothing
of other things, make for me a sort of figure of a floating
island on which he drifts and bumps and coasts about,
wanting to get alongside as much as possible, yet always
with the gap of water, the little island fact, to be somehow
bridged over.'

With his refreshed vision of the New World, the inner
despair of The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the Dove
has broken outwards, and in Gray’s attitude we see a
despair which echoes almost the despair of Baudelaire in
his Intimate Journals. It is not too much to say that
Gray takes pleasure in the pure evil of his friend’s mis-
appropriations, his ‘profoundly nefarious attitude.’ Gray
sees money as evil, and money as civilization, and evil as
breeding evil, and overshadowing civilization, and what
distinguishes himself from the other people in his world
is not his virtue, but simply his moral consciousness of
evil, a consciousness in which he can rejoice.

If The Ivory Tower had been finished, it would have
been possible to see that James had emerged from that
period in his development which corresponds to the
Ulysses period in Joyce; but that James, instead of in-
venting an inner language to correspond with Work in
Progress, wrote books that open out into Lawrence’s
novels, and, more obviously, Faulkner’s. Joyce’s later
work corresponds perhaps to the period in James of The
Golden Bowl: Joyce is at the end of a period of elabora-
tion, not at the beginning of a period of simplicity.

The Ivory Tower is, unfortunately, only a fragment
containing several wonderful scenes — the scenes between
Graham and his uncle, Graham and Rosanna Gaw,
Graham and Horton Vint; and the garden party at Mrs.
Bradham’s. James had finished less than a third of the

THE IVORY TOWER 105

book, in its final version, when the Great War broke out,
and, as Mr. Percy Lubbock puts it, he ‘found he could
no longer work upon a fiction supposed to represent
contemporary or recent life.’

Accordingly he returned to the fantasy, The Sense
of the Past, the first two books of which had been written
some years previously, and then put aside. On December
2nd, when nearly four books were complete, he was
attacked by his last illness. So that The Sense of the Past
is also only a fragment. But the notes to it are even
completer than those for The Ivory Tower, and the whole
plot is outlined.

James was a sincere admirer of H. G. Wells’s scientific
romances, and when he wrote The Sense of the Past he
may have been curious to invent his own Time Machine.
But the manner in which his young hero, Ralph Pendrel,
travels back a hundred years into the late eighteenth
century, is not so much scientific, as literary and philo-
sophic. When Ralph, the young American traveller,
obsessed with his sense of the past, changes place with
the young American, who, a hundred years ago, made
the same journey, and who is obsessed with the sense of
the Future, he achieves what Gertrude Stein would call
a ‘continuous present.’ The young men do not meet
half-way, in the middle of the century. Nor does the one
sacrifice his present, in order to achieve the other’s past.
They both step into each other’s shoes, and they do it by
living in a time which is neither past nor future, but
present. The Sense of the Past is, in fact, a product of the
‘time obsession’ which is typical of a whole school of
modern literature, and is particularly found in Proust:
it has all the symptoms of the school of literature which
is brilliantly diagnosed by Mr. Wyndham Lewis in his
Time and Western Man.

io6 HENRY JAMES

When Ralph, in a moment of caution, before making
his journey into the past, explains his case to the American
Ambassador, he begins by explaining, ‘You see. I’m not
myself,’ and the Ambassador understands him to mean that
he combines in himself two persons. But Ralph, although
he feels himself to be the other man, also feels that the other
man is he: ‘Our duality is so far from diminished that
it’s only the greater. The man ridden by curiosity about
the Past can't^ you’ll grasp, be one and the same with
the man ridden by his curiosity about the Future.’

Although the men are separate, each combines in
himself the situation of both. The experiences of Ralph
in the eighteenth century have already been gone through
by his real predecessor.

Ralph is fascinated — when he takes over the old house
which has been left to him in the London Square — by the
portrait of a young man, who is painted looking away
from the painter. The whole situation hangs on this
picture, on the sense that the young man is turned away
from his contemporaries towards the Future, just as
Ralph is turned towards the Past. It is with this young
man that he changes places, and also the portrait is a
painting of himself. One of the finest effects which
James proposes in his notes is the account of the painting
of this portrait; so disturbing to the painter, who is
profoundly shocked by his intuition of the strangeness
in Ralph. Thus, in the account of the portrait, a con-
tinual series of transformations is suggested, by which
the six months of Ralph’s visit to the eighteenth century
is made perpetually recurrent, because when he is
attracted by the portrait he is attracted by himself, and,
when he is stepping into the eighteenth century, he is
repeating an action which he must already have made
before, in order that the portrait should have been painted.

THE IVORY TOWER

107

This suggestion of a repeated Present is like a nail
(as James would put it, a ‘silver nail’) hammered through
the book. Unfortunately the idea is not fully worked
out in the parts of the book that are completed, and in
the notes the whole force of what is implied seems to
be realized — very exceptionally for James — almost as an
afterthought.

There is another idea, also a nail which fixes the situa-
tion. This depends on the important provision that there
are, after all, two young men, and that Ralph’s journey
into the Past has always its parallel of the other young
man’s journey into the Future. Ralph immediately
grasps, when he steps into the eighteenth-century drawing-
room — the drama hangs on his having such intuitions —
that he is engaged to Molly Midmore. But his most
important divergence— his really anachronistic act— is to
fall in love with her sister Nan. This is not only unex-
pected and a part of his ghostly attribute of strange-
ness (he is always a ghost: this book is the biography
of a ghost, and the other characters are also ghosts
to him) to the eighteenth-century family, but also it is
literally unprecedented by the other young man. A
further complication arises here, because Nan is also in
love with him, as well as he with her: that is to say, she
is in love with him because she believes him to be the
other young man, the young man who is now in the
Future: because she has gone through the experience of
being in love with him in the Past. Not only does Ralph
cast a shadow into the Future, but also the Midmores
cast a shadow into the Past. Or, rather, they cast a
shadow into what is their Reality; which depends on
Ralph being a real contemporary; and their situation has
likewise its real precedent, which Ralph is only copying,
in which an American young man did marry Molly

io8 HENRY JAMES

Midmore, and was secretly loved by the younger sister,
although he did not respond to her passion. As it is,
the younger sister saves the situation, because she is
able to understand Ralph’s secret, and thus help him to
get back into the twentieth century.

The Sense of the Past is, of course, fantasy, but
fantasy is one of the most important aspects of James’s
art. James quotes The Turn of the Screw as his precedent
in writing the book, and I have tried to show that that
story is a serious study.

The Sense of the Past is a triumphant variation on the
familiar theme of the International Situation. The young
man brings America to Europe, and we have a conflict
which is the subject of many of James’s stories. But
here the situation is given another dimension, because
the young man is travelling not only through distance,
but also through time. It is no wonder that James
looked on Ralph as a means of escape from the Europe
of the War, because he is not only a geographical traveller
who seeks to make James’s work part of a wider culture
than the American culture (this is a purpose of all his
emissaries), but he is also a traveller who seeks to give
James’s work a wide, historical basis. He is escaping
from the fear that the novel which relies for its subject-
matter on contemporary life, is itself as transitory as the
violent, and hence transitory, civilization which it de-
scribes, a civilization which at any moment may be
engulfed in war or destroyed by suicidal economic
collapse.

Ralph in his time-journey succeeds in vindicating a
moral, which James always clung to, but the last shreds
of which seemed to be consumed in the flames of The
Ivory Tower.

He vindicates the good, puritan American brand of

THE IVORY TOWER 109

faith in Free Will. Ralph is in a situation which is in
the completest sense pre-destined, for the reason that it
has actually taken place. One would take it that however
freedom of will may qualify the behaviour of people in
the present, it cannot change their actions in the past.
Everything which the Midmore family say and do, they
have already done; their past is already written, and their
performance is an encore. Ralph enters their world fully
knowing this, and with the conviction that all he has
to do is to act, for all that he is worth, the part of the
other American young man. His r6le is that of in a
given equation, the other symbols of which represent
perfectly known quantities; all he has to do is to discover
from the conjunction of them what are his own attributes.
But the moral interest of the story lies in the fact that he
upsets the eighteenth century by falling in love with the
wrong girl, the girl whom he thinks of as essentially
‘modern,’ and whom the eighteenth - century young
American could never on any account, in the Midmore
circle, have chosen.

Here, again, James, by his flight into the Past, manages
to vindicate his morality. We are back in a situation —
the most romantic of all his situations— in which love
really counts. Ralph loves Nan, and Nan loves the
other young man, whom she takes him to be. When
she realizes their mistake, time, through the strength of
her and his love, can be put straight, and Ralph can
safely be landed back in the twentieth century. The
twentieth century is also vindicated in the light of the
eighteenth. After all, the eighteenth is even more vulgar
on account of the smells, the lack of hygiene, the selfish-
ness, the open greed, the superficial cleverness, the
intolerance.

So these two posthumously published books are at

110 HENRY JAMES

completely opposite poles. The one represents an un-
precedented awareness of the Present, and is, indeed,
for James, almost a flight into the Future; the other
represents reaction, and a violent flight into the Past.
Between these two poles lies a whole school of modern
literature, which takes us far beyond James, amongst
our immediate contemporaries.

PARX TWO

THRKE INDIVIDUALISTS

V

A BRIDGE

His unique individuality makes it difficult to bridge
the gulf between James and any other writer. The gulf
is no mere matter of time. Compare him with Wilde
or any other of his Tellow Book contemporaries, and
the gulf is wider than between him and Yeats, in his
later period, or even Lawrence or Joyce.

His problems were essentially those of writers that
followed him, and not those of his contemporaries.
Modern writing has not even in Lawrence entirely
forsaken the aristocracy which James described : Hermione
in Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley, are both Jamesian
characters, though James would have been surprised at
their setting. That remarkable story The Altar of the
Dead has echoes both in Joyce’s story. The Dead, and
in Eliot’s criticism. The side of James which is illustrated
in stories of ghosts and magic, such as The Turn of the
Screw and Owen Wingrave, is illumined by an examina-
tion of Yeats’s spiritualism. The Sense of the Past succeeds
in creating a legend by which James escaped from the
present, and was able to rest securely in traditional beliefs
that would have been contradicted, had he looked for
affirmation in the War. One finds the same legend
expressed in Yeats:

‘Midnight has come, and the great Christ Church Bell

And many a lesser bell, sound through the room;

And it is All Souls’ Night,

H 113

THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

1 14

And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel
Bubble upon the table. A ghost may come;

For it is a ghost’s right,

His element is so fine
Being sharpened by his death,

To drink from the wine-breath

While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.
I need some mind that, if the cannon sound
From every quarter of the world, can stay
Wound in mind’s pondering,

As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound;

Because I have a marvellous thing to say,

A certain marvellous thing
None but the living mock.

Though not for sober ear;

It may be all that hear

Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.’

The true place of James is, then, not amongst his own
contemporaries, but with ours. One should set The Turn
of the Screw beside Yeats’s poetry, The Ambassadors and
The Golden Bowl beside Ulysses^ the critical prefaces
beside Eliot’s criticism.

VI

YEATS AS A REALIST

W. B. Yeats is an isolated figure in modern writing,
whose achievements at first seem only to be explained by
his extreme individuality.

His individuality is emphasized by the romantic line
of his development, which is reminiscent of Goethe. He
began as the writer of romantic, twilight poetry. Late in
life, he is now writing his best poetry, most of which is
inspired by contemporary political events, and by the
lives of his friends. His awareness, his passionate rhythms,
breaking away completely from the limp early work,
remind one of the opening stanzas of Goethe’s West-
Oestlicher-Divan, written also in a time of European
revolution, following on a terrible series of wars.

‘Nord und West und Sud zersplittern.

Throne bersten, Reiche zittern,

Fliichte du, im reinen Osten
Patriarchenluft zu kosten!

Unter Lieben, Trinken, Singen
Soli dich Chisers Quell verjiingen’

compares with:—

‘At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,

Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame.
Where blood-begotten spirits come
"5

ii6 THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

And all complexities of fury leave,

Dying into a dance,

An agony of trance,

An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.’

The command to flight, except into the pride of his
own individualism, is not there in Yeats; at the end of
his life he goes further than Goethe in renouncing his
romanticism.

Like Goethe, the stream of Yeats’s romantic poetry was
interrupted by his public life. The effect of politics on
his writing was revolutionary.

This development, which at first seems unique, was the
result of three main influences: the influence on him of
certain changes in social life that took place during his life
and that of his friends; the influence of his interest in magic;
the influence on him of symbolist theories of poetry.

Although at one time he sought very consciously to
root his poetry in the popular ballad poetry of Ireland,
the literary influences which are to be found in his
earliest, as in his most recent verse, are contemporary
writing and writers. He does not go back, with the
completeness of Eliot in The Waste Land, to the late
Elizabethans, and achieve by his diction a striking
historic comparison of the earlier period’s greatness and
decay with our own. His early poetry is, in spite of its
ballad style (in fact, because of it), unashamedly of the
’eighties, just as his present writing is perhaps almost a
little too dazzlingly ‘modern.’ As a young man, his
friends were such men as Dowson, J. A. Symonds, Lionel
Johnson and all the Rhymers. He was obviously, in his
middle period, excited by the French symbolists: to-day
it is not difficult to appreciate that he is an admirer of
Ezra Pound and that he has read T. S. Eliot.

YEATS AS A REALIST 117

But his earlier work also shows that to a poet of his
stature a contemporary influence, even when combined
with a very great talent, is not enough. Beautiful as some
of these poems are, they are enervating and contain a
weariness of which Yeats seems, in his old age, quite
incapable. One cannot imagine him saying to-day:
T will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree’— which
calls up the image of a young man reclining on a yellow
satin sofa. There would be a roar of thunder, a flash, and
he would be off.

In Adam's Curse this sense of the inadequacy of his
earlier inspiration seems to reach a climax. The poem is
a dialogue between the poet and a woman, whose art
of love is supposed to be as great as the poet’s art of
poetry. The poet first boasts of the trouble he takes over
his versifying:

‘A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought.

Our stitching and unstitching has been nought.’

Then he complains of being thought an idler:

‘By the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.’

Of whose air of reality, he seems oddly envious.

The woman then replies, ‘That we must labour to be
beautiful,’ and the poet, of course, concludes that she is
referring to the difficult art of love.

The two speakers then sit silent and watching the day
die and ‘A moon, worn as if it had been a shell.’ Then the
poem ends with the curious reflection:

ii8 THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

‘I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:

That you were beautiful, and that I strove

To love you in the old high way of love;

That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown

As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.’

This poem seems to mark the end of a phase, because
the poet’s inability to love in the old high way, and his
feeling that the symbol of the moon was hollow, reveals
a conscious dissatisfaction with his art.

In the series of poems published in 1910 and called
The Green Helmet and Other Poems, he seems tempted to
abandon poetry altogether. In one of the poems he
explains :

‘All things can tempt me from this craft of verse :

One time it was a woman’s face, or worse—

The seeming needs of my fool-driven land.’

The weakness of the second line— only rescued by the
dash and comma— indicates the writer’s somewhat dis-
tracted mood. The inspiration of Yeats’s best poetry is
mostly occasional, but here the poems seem to have an
altogether occasional nature, in the sense that they form
the background to various activities which engaged
Yeats at the time, and also to his preoccupation with
Irish politics. There are poems on such subjects as
A Friend's Illness, At Galway Races, Upon a House shaken
by the hand Agitation. There is one poem called The
Fascination of What's Difficult, in which he complains of
the passing of inspiration.

Nevertheless, these poems contain a germ impregnated
by the external world which grew up into the later
poems. They seem to be a drying up, but, really, they

YEATS AS A REALIST 119

are the beginning of something quite different and
new.

The kind of poetry which is considerable as art and
which is not based on a consciously sought-out tradition,
is likely to be rooted deeply not so much in the writing
of contemporaries, which forms its superficial soil, and
which is merely an influence, as in the actual life of the
time. Yeats’s book of Autobio^aphies — which form so
strange a mixture of discretion and self-revelation — show
how deep was his thirst for the life around him.

The world of the Autobiographies is very different
from that of The Celtic Twilight. The scene is, for the
most part, London. The actors— and they were actors —
are Lionel Johnson, Wilde, Morris, George Russell and
all the literary and Irish-political figures of that time.
These people are not in the least idealized, very few of
them are fairies, and then only in a worldly sense; they
are seen in a hard, clear, but undramatic light, and the
sordid aspect of their lives — their drink, dope and debts —
is not concealed.

Yeats’s attitude to what he calls the ‘Tragic Generation,’
the generation of The Tellow Book and the Rhymers’
Club, was that of one who felt that their destiny was his
own, and who yet felt dissatisfied with them and critical.
The central point of his criticism was what involved
him most deeply in his own work: the relation of their
emotional, unbalanced lives to their accomplished, trance-
like poetry. ‘Another day,’ he writes, when attempting
to explain to himself the series of domestic tragedies
that overcame so many of them, ‘I think that perhaps
our form of lyric, our insistence upon emotion which
has no relation to any public interest, gathered together
overwrought, unstable men; and remember, the moment
after, that the first to go out of his mind had no lyrical

120 THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

gift, and that we valued him mainly because he seemed a
witty man of the world; and that a little later a man who
seemed, alike as man and writer, dull and formless, went
out of his mind, first burning poems which I cannot
believe would have proved him, as the one man who saw
them claims, a man of genius.’

So that he was not only in contact with the literary
movement of his time, he was also deeply involved with
the people who made it. He took his tradition, not so
much from books (as he had at first imagined he should
do), as from the lives of those people who created his
cultural environment, and whose lives presented a picture
of civilization to him in its most vivid form. Their lives,
deeply rooted in the lives of their ancestors, saturate
his later poetry; especially the poetry of The Tower. I
only wish sometimes that he had allowed his interest
to extend still further, outside the immediate circle of
his friends, into the social life that surrounded him.

I believe that what distinguished Yeats from those
other writers is not so much — as Dr. Leavis has said — his
power of self-criticism, as his realism. He is far too
rhetorical a writer to be self-critical. It is clear from the
style of his prose that he must constantly be presenting
himself to himself in a dramatic manner; and his con-
versation gives the same impression. He is capable,
because he has the highest intelligence, and because his
rhetoric is not the rhetoric of the politician, of passionate
seriousness, of penitence, and of an almost excessive
sense of responsibility. No lines ring truer in his verse
than:

‘Things said or done long years ago.

Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do.

Weigh me down, and not a day

YEATS AS A REALIST 121

But something is recalled,

My conscience or my vanity appalled.’

This verse shows how realism is not inconsistent with
a certain romanticism, especially when it is self-
dramatizing, and indeed one might say that it was Yeats’s
sense of reality which made him exploit his gift as a
romantic poet; but he is certainly not a master of self-
criticism, as Eliot is.

Yeats was strengthened in his attitude to the life
around him by certain of his intellectual experiences.
The chief of these were the three influences of the Irish
Literary Renaissance, Magic and Symbolism, and his
interest in contemporary politics, which seem in the
last years to have broadened into a prophetic concern
(which resembles that of Stefan George, during and
after the war) with the destiny of Europe.

At first sight the Irish Renaissance, so venomously
featured by George Moore in his Hail and Farewell^ seems
inextricably tangled with the Magic and Symbolism.
But actually it played a conflicting r6le in his work,
directing it towards the Irish legends and the Celtic
Twilight, whereas the Magic and Symbolism became
essentially part of his approach to the world around him.
One also has to distinguish between the Symbolism which
had to do with the Magic and the Symbolism which was
part of the symbolist movement in poetry. This close
connexion between the mystery of magical symbols and
the literary movement of H.D., Ezra Pound and their
followers, is typical of Yeats. However mysterious and
shadowy it is, his poetry has always the stamp of
success, and his magic invocations always have a slightly
public air.

The beginnings of the Irish Renaissance were directed

122 THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

towards creating a folk poetry which would be strictly
Irish. ‘When Lionel Johnson and Katherine Tynan (as
she was then), and I myself began to reform Irish poetry,’
he writes (in a business-like way) in Poetry and Tradition,
‘we thought to keep unbroken the thread running up to
Grattan which John O’Leary had put into our hands,
though it might be our business to explore new paths of
the labyrinth. We sought to make a more subtle rhythm,
a more organic form than that of the older Irish poets
who wrote in English, but always to remember certain
ardent ideas and high attitudes of mind which were the
nation itself, to our belief, so far as a nation can be
summarized in the intellect.’ In the essay on T^e Celtic
Element in Literature, in Ideas of Good and Evil, the
subject-matter which is suitably Celtic is indicated. This
essay is a short account of the Celtic Sagas, and we are
told how the Bards ‘took the blossoms of the oak, and
the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the
meadow-sweet, and produced from them a maiden the
fairest and most graceful men ever saw; and they baptized
her and called her the Flower Aspect.’ It is in this world
of dream that The Wanderings of Oisin and the early
ballad poetry moves.

But even the Irish Renaissance dragged Yeats away
from its own mysteries, and forced many practical
problems upon his attention, and surrounded him with
an active social life. The Abbey Theatre was founded,
and in it he must have met many people who were
distressingly unlike the fairies of his dreams.

Magic was closely linked with his Irish childhood.
He was so accustomed to think and speak of ghosts and
fairies, that it is unlikely he could have completely
escaped from their influence. The Celtic Twilight is,
as Forrest Reid remarks, ‘thick with ghosts. . . .

YEATS AS A REALIST

123

Drumcliff and Rosses are the places where they are to
be found thickest.’ The ‘good people ’ abound, and they
carry off the souls of peasants.

As a young man in London, he scientifically developed
his magical experiences by attending stances, visiting
haunted houses, and calling on Madame Blavatsky.
Mrs. Katherine Tynan Hinkson (as she became) de-
scribes an alarming stance in which the spirits became
very annoyed and where ‘Willie Yeats was banging his
head on the table as though he had a fit, muttering to
himself. I had a cold repulsion to the whole business.’

His own descriptions of what happened at stances
leave me with the same sort of bewilderment as do the
dully sensational messages rapped out on turning tables.
I am impressed by the appearance of a man in black and
a hump-backed woman who are apparently engaged in
making flesh by mechanical means, but I search vainly
in myself for any scale of values which can make such
appearances seem to have significance.

His own interest in these phenomena seems, at least
partly, to have been a scientific curiosity, for they have
little relation to the part that the theory of magic plays
in his poetry. A system of magic forms his approach to
certain problems, corresponding to the psychological
approach of such writers as Joyce or Lawrence. In the
essay on Magic^ he writes:

‘I believe . . .

‘(i) That the borders of our minds are ever shifting,
and that many minds can flow into one another, as it
were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.

‘(2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting,
and that our memories are a part of one great memory,
the memory of Nature herself.

^ Ideas of Good and Evil (1903), p. 29.

124 THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

‘(3) That this great mind and great memory can be
evoked by symbols.

T often think I would put this belief in magic from me
if I could, for I have come to see or to imagine, in men
and women, in houses, in handicrafts, in nearly all sights
and sounds, a certain evil, a certain ugliness, that comes
from the slow perishing through the centuries of a
quality of mind that made this belief and its evidences
common over the world.’

I do not think that D. H. Lawrence would have
quarrelled with these sentiments, although he may not
have admired Yeats’s work. Also, the whole passage is
suited to appear in any psychological text-book.

Later, he expands this belief into another observation,
which explains the subject of much contemporary psycho-
logical literature:

‘All men, certainly all imaginative men, must be
for ever casting forth enchantments, glamours, illusions;
and all men, especially tranquil men who have no powerful
egoistic life, must be continually passing under their
power. Our most elaborate thoughts, elaborate purposes,
precise emotions, are often, as I think, not really ours,
but have on a sudden come up, as it were, out of hell
or down out of heaven.’

This may be linked with his theory of symbolism,
which is even more orthodoxly psychological :

‘I cannot now think symbols less than the greatest of
all powers whether they are used consciously by the
masters of magic or half consciously by their successors,
the poet, the musician and the artist. At first I tried to
distinguish between symbols and symbols, between what
I called inherent symbols and arbitrary symbols, but the
distinction has come to mean little or nothing. Whether
their power has arisen out of themselves, or whether it

YEATS AS A REALIST 125

has an arbitrary origin, matters little, for they act, as I
believe, because the great memory associates them with
certain events and moods and persons. Whatever the
passions of man have gathered about, becomes a symbol
in the great memory, and in the hands of him that has
the secret, it is a worker of wonders, a caller up of angels
or of devils.’

His theory of symbolism led him firstly to search for a
mysterious symbol which would contain everything
outside the writer’s self :

‘By the help of an image
I call to my own opposite, summon all
That I have handled least, least looked upon.’^

By an inverse process, symbolism also leads to a
universal significance being attached to certain images
in his poetry, which in other romantic poetry would
only remain details of observation or of invocation. It
thus enables him to exploit to the utmost his very
limited power of observing nature. George Moore
has described how Yeats would walk about the country
without ever looking at anything. The visual experiences
of his whole life which have found their way into his
poetry could probably be counted on the fingers of
both hands. The Tower, the moorhen, the wild swans
at Coole, a few trees (without leaves, for the most part),
the winding stair, the fisherman, a hare, certain of his
friends, have all the same significance in Yeats, as cats
and negresses have in Baudelaire’s poetry.

In the early symbolist poems, in The JVind among the
Reeds, the symbolism, the magic and the twilight are all
interwoven, and the symbols therefore lose power because
they are not sufficiently isolated.

^ From Ego Dominus Thus,

126 THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

‘I hear the Shadowy Horses, their long manes a-shake,

Their hoofs heavy with tumult, their eyes glimmering
white;

The North unfolds above them clinging, creeping night.

The East her hidden joy before the morning break.

The West weeps in pale dew and sighs passing away.

The South is pouring down roses of crimson fire.’

Here the reader may fail to realize that far more than a
mere mood of trance is being conjured up : the symbols all
really stand for something.

Or when Yeats writes:

‘Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns

I have been changed to a hound with one red ear;’

the reader, unless he is well up in magical practices, may
fail to realize that he means that he has really been
turned into a hound with one red ear.

Symbols derived from witches and the moon, unless
they are used in some very particular sense, as in Baude-
laire— in the sense that they are mV— naturally lose the
full force of an isolated crystal experience into which
the poet is gazing.

It therefore happens that the method is most successful
when it is applied to objects which are, in the magical
sense, least symbolic. The friends of his youth whom he
names, the particular tower which he owns, the particular
fisherman whom he met,

‘Although I can see him still.

The freckled man who goes
To a grey place on a hill
In grey Connemara clothes

YEATS AS A REALIST

127

At dawn to cast his flies,

It’s long since I began
To call up to the eyes
This wise and simple man.’

about whom he wrote the

‘Poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn.’

Yeats is a poet who, finding himself in a desperate
situation, has buttressed and shored up his work — as
though it were, perhaps, his ancestral Tower— on every
side. The reader is at every stage perplexed. First, he
imagines that all is to be mystery and twilight and that
he dare hardly listen, he must be so silent, for fear lest
he disturb the fairies. To his disappointment he hears
the fairy song grow fainter and fainter, until it dis-
appears over the crest of the twilit hill. But Yeats has
not disappeared. On the contrary, the reader now dis-
covers that the fairies were only a part of a theory that
by writing about them one could create a popular Irish
ballad poetry. The fairies then merge into a theory of
magic: but the magic, although much talked of, and
although the poet never fails to produce a hush-hush
solemn atmosphere, seems always to be something of a
hoax. It has an element in it of spiritualist stances
attended by a journalist, in order that he may broadcast
his impressions of them.

In the first place, Yeats’s attitude to magical events
seems always to be that of a doctor instead of a witch
doctor, and, in the second place, his poetry is only
magical in the sense that he can produce a certain atmo-
sphere. Yeats has written plenty of romantic poetry,

128 THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

plenty of obscure poetry, some nonsense, and much
mystification, but nothing which one could say was
magical. Nothing, for instance, which has the magical
quality of Eliot’s poem. The Hollow Men. No lines to
compare with :

‘Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:

There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.’

Not even the magic, plus theories of symbolism and
pure poetry, have enabled him to reproduce the effect
of the line which he so admires in Nashe: ‘Brightness
falls from the air.’ Lastly, to complete his ambiguity, the
result of the search for one symbol was the discovery
that almost anything might become that symbol.

What one admires in Yeats’s poetry is, in fact, not its
mystery, its magic or even its atmosphere : but its
passion, its humanity, its occasional marvellous lucidity,
its technical mastery, its integrity, its strength, its reality
and its opportunism.

Why, then, is this romantic facade at all necessary?
Or, since it exists, why does it not falsify the whole
effect? The answer is that Yeats’s poetry is devoid of
any unifying moral subject, and it develops in a perpetual
search for one. Although he has much wisdom, he offers
no philosophy of life, but, as a substitute, a magical

YEATS AS A REALIST

129

system, which, where it does not seem rhetorical, is
psycho-analytic, but not socially constructive. Reverent as
he is, he does not convey any religion; instead, we are
offered, in such poems as Prayer for my Daughter, an
aristocratic faith. It is illuminating to consider what
exactly Yeats does pray for his daughter, because pre-
sumably these are the qualities which he considers most
important to a human being, (i) He wants her to be
beautiful, but not too beautiful. (2) Courteous.

(3) ‘O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.’

(4) ‘An intellectual hatred is the worst,

So let her think opinions are accursed.’

(Cf. Henry James.)

(5) ‘And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;

For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.

How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born .?

Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.’

I have quoted the last verse in full because it shows
how Yeats’s rhetoric illustrates his thought, rather
than develops it. This poem does a good deal to
explain why Yeats should have taken refuge from the
modern world at first in magic, and why in his later
poems, although there is a great show of intellectualism,
he rests really always on certain qualities, rather than
ideas, such as breeding and courtesy. For the thought is
hopelessly inadequate to his situation. And the reader
who goes to Yeats hoping to find in his work thought

THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

130

which is as profound as his contemporary awareness,
goes away as a hungry sheep unfed.

His awareness is shown best of all in that extraordinary
poem The Second Coming:

‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.’

The courageous acceptance of this poem makes
the set of virtues which Yeats wishes his daughter
seem more than ever unsuitable, and even impossible.
Indeed, his insistence on aristocratic qualities of mind
even limits his humanity, which is his greatest virtue.
If one turns from Prayer for My Daughter to Wilfred
Owen’s poem, Strange Meetings one sees that Owen was
already a poet of far deeper human understanding.
These lines seem almost like an answer to Yeats’s
fortissimo lyrics :

‘“Strange friend,” I said, “here is no cause to
mourn.”

“None,” said the other, “save the undone years.

The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours.

Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,

Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair.

But mocks the steady running of the hour.

And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.

For by my glee might many men have laughed.

And of my weeping something had been left

YEATS AS A REALIST 131

Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,

The pity of war, the pity war distilled.

Now men will go content with what we spoiled.

Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.

They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from
progress.

Courage was mine, and I had mystery.

Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery;

To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.

Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-
wheels

I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.

I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.” ’

Yeats has found, as yet, no subject of moral significance
in the social life of his time. Instead of a subject, he offers
us magnificent and lively rapportage about his friends.
The only exception is in the poem called The Second
Coming. He has put up a great many props, the largest
prop of all being his own noble egotism. And he has
created an atmosphere of legend. All the elements
combine to produce the legend. In such poems as the
second section of The Tower, and All Souls' Night, Yeats’s
friends— the real characters from the Autobiographies and
the fantastic characters from the early stories, and all the
imagery of the earlier poetry— become inextricably mixed
into a world of legend which, although it has no moral an^
no religion, provides authentically a personal vision of lif^^.

VII

T. S. ELIOT IN HIS POETRY

X. S. Eliot is, like Henry James, a naturalized New
Englander, who, as a writer, rebels against the English
lack of a consistent literary tradition. Unprecedented as
his poetry seems in English, it is really a sharp corrective
to contemporary writing, rather than a powerful and
originating force. A great many of his effects, which
seem at first most startling, are transfusions from the
French: with him from Baudelaire and, especially, the
French Symbolists. His earlier poetry is influenced by
Laforgue.

But, unlike James, Eliot does not succeed completely
as an original artist, whose work is the source flowing
into a whole school of modern writing. In spite of the
most extraordinary efforts to reconcile himself with
tradition, and yet remain a poet living in the modern
world, he has not succeeded in forming the kind of
synthesis which one finds in James’s work, which makes
the later novels creatively imaginative, and yet psycho-
logically more true to their time than the naturalistic
books of the earlier period. Eliot seems anxious ^ to
make nonsense of someone’s calling The Waste Land
the ‘poem of a generation.’ Yet it is easy to see in what
sense this was meant, and in what sense it contains a
truth. For in Eliot, as in a dozen other modern artists
— as in Joyce, in Proust, in Baudelaire, in Rilke even-
one never is far removed from connotation: from the

^ In After Strange Gods.

132

T. S. ELIOT IN HIS POETRY

133

trick of the object, or the psychological symptom, or the
historic parallel, or the apt quotation quickly observed
and noted down; always the one particular thing uniquely
expressed and treated as a symptom. One notices further
that there is a tendency in the work of all these artists
to regard life as an illness, and themselves (although
they, too, are very seriously ill) as doctors or nurses or
spiritual fathers, or mere affectionate holders of fading
hands.

Eliot has not only the gift of connotatio n, but also a
genius for describing a particular situation. In The
W aste hand he seems, more than in any other poem, and
more than any other artist, to describe the contemporary
post-war situation of a certain very small class of intel-
lectuals in Europe and America. Here, in expressing
the situation of a small class, he goes much further than
in any other earlier or later poem. For this longer poem
seems to form a climax to all that he has as yet written,
and the other poems, on the one side, ascend to that
position, and on the other hand fall away from it. What
one sees in the earlier, as in the later, poems is the ex-
perience of a purely isolated sensibility. Although he
goes much further than James, in accepting the modern
world, his subject-matter is even more limited than that of
James: James at least describes a whole aristocratic class
in terms that most people could, with a certain amount of
application, understand; Eliot indicates the whole modern
world, but in a subjective way. A pub-crawling prostitute
could understand very well what Henry James meant by
the prince and Mr. Verver; they are well within the
range of her experience. But no charwoman or prostitute
in London would recognize herself in the second part of
the A Game of Chess section of The W aste Land, although
it reports almost realistically the conversation of these ladies

134 THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

in a London pub. This passage does not objectively
present the people it describes; it merely exists in the
mind of the reader, who is made to imagine that he is
sharing the life of the people. But what he is really
seeing and hearing is a part of his own mind.

Eliot’s poetry is full of these fragmentary, in-
tellectualized sense-impressions. They are romantically
stimulating, because they suggest some very important
private association. The key to modern romanticism is
in the private poem, that is, the poetry of public appear-
ances, which are, by the use of language, made full of
private significance. Such is the poisie de departs,
the poetry of the week-end visit to the country, the
private jokes in Auden’s work. The best example is the
suggestion of Baudelaire in his Intimate ’Journal, that
perhaps the ships which he observes anchored in the
harbour are really pointing towards happiness.

The true descendant of Baudelaire is discovering not
an outward reality, but, in external symbols, his own
spiritual individuality. It follows that the objects outside
himself have an added poignancy, because, in themselves,
deprived of the poet’s inventive genius, they are frag-
mentary and devoid of meaning. Modern life is a kind
of Hell, but even that view has to be modified; it is,
as it were, a fragmentary Hell, a Hell devoid of con-
sistency, too stupid to punish anyone, and without moral
severity. It is as impossible, according to the values of
the modern world, to be damned as to be saved. In
poems like the Preludes, the Rhapsody on a Windy Night,
and Morning at a Window, Eliot extends this view of a
world where

‘Midnight shakes the memory

As a madman shakes a dead geranium.’

T. S. ELIOT IN HIS POETRY 135

The peculiar horror of this world is that the people in
it are as much things as the gutter, the street, the cats, the
pipes, etc. They are spiritually dead, and there is a dead
sameness about all their activities:

‘And short square fingers stuffing pipes.

And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties.

The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.’

The only sign of life is that pity is still possible :

‘I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:

The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.’

It is not altogether the same pity for human suffering
as one finds in James, and that in Wilfred Owen’s poetry
is so all-sufficient that he could write of them ‘the poetry
is in the pity.’ It is an extension of this pity; humanity
is not pitied because it suffers, but because it exists at all,
and resembles, in its totality, this gentle and suffering
thing. The pity is in the notion of a humanity without
humanity.

Eliot, being an extremely moral writer, is also an
extremely isolated writer. He is not concerned with
saving the world: reformers seem to him as irrelevant as
anything else in the objects that surround him. His
poetry simply develops from an original position in which
it questions the possibility even of damnation, to a firm
belief, in his most recent poetry, in the possibility of
personal salvation.

THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

136

The original position is made clear enough in the
opening lines of the Love Song o/y. Alfred Prufrock:

‘Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets.

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells :

Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.’

This stanza admirably conveys the poet’s situation.
In the second and third lines nature is sacrificed by the
mind, and the evening becomes a patient. Moreover, if
one examines the form of the stanza one sees that it is
simply and beautifully adequate to the mood and music
of what is expressed, but that it has neither the freedom of
so-called free verse, nor any architectural strength and
cohesion of its own which extends beyond the purpose
of the poem. A new stanza has been contrived but not
invented. The clever line of ‘Of insidious intent,’ which
seems so very effective, shows how completely the form
will flop, if flopping suits Eliot’s purpose. Yet the
verse is musically arranged: what is happening in it is
that architecture is being sacrificed to expression by a
parallel that exactly corresponds to the etheris^ion qfjhe

over the page, and we meet the inmates of

Hell:

T. S. ELIOT IN HIS POETRY 137

‘In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.’

After a description of the fog, we are made aware of
Mr. Prufrock’s feeling of social apprehension :

‘There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that
you meet.’

Again :

‘And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare ?” and, “Do I dare ?’’

Time to turn back and descend the stair.

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair — ’

From an account of his clothes and his thoughts, we
realize that Prufrock is not, as he at first seemed, a rebel
to his surroundings. He is really completely a part of
them, and his ambition seems to be, as he grows older,
more and more ostensibly to ‘fit in.’ Yet a doubt arises
in the reader’s mind, because as he reads on he becomes
convinced that Mr. Prufrock’s policy of conforming is
really an ingenious method of saving himself. However,
the matter is not quite so simple as that, because it
becomes quite certain that Mr. Prufrock has not the
courage to make his proposal: this is important because
the proposal is not merely a proposal. It has become
identified with some statement, some assertion about life
or the nature of the Universe, which, one becomes
convinced, would, if it were made (and at the same time
one feels quite sure it could not be made), settle the
question of Mr. Prufrock’s salvation :

138 THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

‘And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea.

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me.
Would it have been worth while.

To have bitten off the matter with a smile.

To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question.

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead.

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all” —

If one, settling a pillow by her head.

Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;

That is not it, at all.” ’

There is no question in Prujrock of anyone else being
saved; the others are part of the world of things^ which is
beyond damnation : the question is whether Mr. Prufrock
himself is capable of getting out of it, of being alive.

In the second poem in the book. The Portrait of a Lady,
the question is whether the narrator feels himself essen-
tially and in kind different from the lady whose life he
knows to be false and decadent. The difficulty is that she
herself (like everyone else belonging to a certain ‘set’)
seems equally aware of the falsity of her surroundings,
and she embarrasses her guest by understanding his
attitude of considered superiority, and by translating her
understanding into behaviour which ought to suit his
superior moral situation, but which does not happen to
be true to him. She accepts him at his own estimation,
and then shocks him out of complacency by making an
appraising remark which too palpably does not fit:

‘ “You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles’ heel.

You will go on, and when you have prevailed
You can say: at this point many a one has failed.” ’

T. S. ELIOT IN HIS POETRY

139

But the truth is very far from this :

‘I take my hat: how can I make a cowardly amends
For what she has said to me ?

You will see me any morning in the park
Reading the comics and the sporting page.’

Again, the problem we are left with is to consider
whether the narrator is capable of personal salvation :

‘Well! and what if she should die some afternoon,
Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose;
Should die and leave me sitting pen in hand
With the smoke coming down above the housetops;
Doubtful, for a while

Not knowing what to feel or if I understand
Or whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon . . .
Would she not have the advantage, after all ?

This music is successful with a “dying fall’’

Now that we talk of dying —

And should I have the right to smile ?’

This poem is particularly interesting because it is one
of Eliot’s few attempts to enter into the position of
another person in the modern Inferno. But even here
the lady is only interesting because of the question about
the narrator himself which she suggests in his mind.
And her situation is only compared with his because the
thought has occurred to him that it may be possible to
identify it completely with his own. The seriousness of
Eliot’s earlier poetry is conveyed by the impression it
forces that there is indeed only one problem: is the soul
of the individual capable of being saved, damned or
in any way morally judged ? It is a question that applies
to individuals, so it is no egotism of the author’s that

140 THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

makes him search deeply for the answer in himself: the
answer will be found in him as much as in anyone.
His is the one soul that it is his responsibility to
save.

In the light of his later poetry it is evident that just as
Baudelaire was out to be damned, Eliot, perhaps more
modestly, is out to be saved. But at this stage the Church
is only one of the humours of Hades :

‘The hippopotamus’s day
Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;

God works in a mysterious way —

The Church can sleep and feed at once.’

In 1920, when he wrote Gerontion, the picture of
decay was transformed and took on the German features
of a Weltanschauung. Perhaps T. S. Eliot had already
read Hermann Hesse’s Blick ins Chaos., which is quoted
in the notes at the end of The Waste Land\ or perhaps it
was Oswald Spengler, whose Decline of the West was
more influential outside Germany at that time than it
is to-day. Gerontion is an old man, empty of desire, and
whose activities are over, save for the ‘thoughts of a dry
brain in a dry season.’ He corresponds to Tiresias in
The Waste Land. His age, in the life of a single man, is
as old as Western Civilization in the life of Civilizations
(between 70 and 80), so he is particularly well qualified
to be a sympathetic observer. Like some of the more
sensitive intelligences of our own age, he dreams oTthe
THofe potent “events ^ the past^and his past is identified
with the past of Christian culture :

‘ ... in the juvenescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger.’

T. S. ELIOT IN HIS POETRY

141

The period of most heroic and eloquent activity in our
history was the time of the Elizabethans. The motif of
this poem is repeated, as it were, on another plane,
by a passage written in a style plainly derived from
Tourneur, in whom the energy and credulity of
Elizabethan poetry had turned, in a last display of wild
action and magnificent fireworks, into cynicism, despair,
and a strong moral indignation. The passage in Gerontion
beginning :

‘After such knowledge what forgiveness ? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions.

Guides us by vanities,’

is reminiscent of some favourite lines of Eliot’s from The
Revenger's Tragedy:

‘Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours
For thee For thee does she undo herself?

Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships.

For the poor benefit of a bewildering^ minute?

Why does yon fellow falsify highways.

And put his life between the judge’s lips
To refine such a thing— keeps horse and men
To beat their valours for her ?’

The diction, with its suggestion that what was once
simple— the faith in which the age started, and the moral
rules obvious to all — is now complicated and mysterious,
is essentially alike. And Eliot, by his use of such language,
which he adopts again in The Waste Land, not only
gives the form of his verse an architectural strength
which it had previously lacked, but he also achieves a

^ In some editions, ‘bewitching.’

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THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

striking historical comparison of the late Elizabethan
and early Jacobean writers with those of our own time.
We think too often of the late Elizabethans as a group of
writers who were overshadowed by the genius of Shake-
speare, and of their writing as being a form that was
breaking up, even if it was not actually decadent. What
we never think enough of is the subject-matter of their
writing, or of how far their attention and hence their
creativeness was affected by the outward scene. Their
attention was directed towards Italy— though this is often
almost discounted : they are so English, we are told — and
they were seeing and hearing, not the fabulous Renaissance
and the revival of classicism, but the other side of the
Renaissance: the political intrigues, the murders, the
violence of cardinals, princes and politicians. Eliot,
feeling himself in a Europe of cultural decay, unbelief,
mass-murder, torture, political intrigue, usury and faith-
lessness, made the discovery that the late Elizabethans
were describing a world which had much in common
with our own.

Gerontion is an objective poem. It is in complete
contrast to the preceding subjective poems. It no longer
expresses the disgust and horror of one man at symptoms
which one might after all believe to be purely subjective.
It is written in the belief that the decline of civilization is
real, that history is, as it were, now senile.

The same objectivity is observed in The Waste Land,
for which one may take Gerontion almost as a study.
The Waste Land is a restatement of the position which
Eliot had reached in 1922; it forms a summary of the
situations of the other poems, and besides this, it contains
an objective element which the other poems had never
expressed.

All the figures of the earlier poems are here. Most

T. S. ELIOT IN HIS POETRY

>43

important of all, there is Gerontion, grown into Tiresias,
a more universal figure, because, not only is he old, and
a wise spectator, but in him meet both the sexes. A
lady, reminding us of her in The Portrait of a Lady, has
collapsed completely; is nervous and conscious of failure.
And Prufrock, now only a voice, is at last able to answer
her questions:

‘Speak to me. Why do you never speak .? Speak.

“What are you thinking of ? What thinking ? What?

I never know what you are thinking. Think.”

I think we are in rats’ alley

Where the dead men lost their bones.’

Sweeney is here, and the company with which we
associate him :

‘He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,

A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare.

One of the low on whom assurance sits

As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.’

Secondly, Eliot has further extended the pastiche
method of Gerontion. His fragmentary but extraordinary
literary sensibility resembles his sensibility to a frag-
mentary world which surrounds him. As a poet, he is
impressed in exactly the same way by lilac, say, as by a
line of poetry such as 'Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant
dans la coupoleV and in the same way as the imagery
of lilac is brought into juxtaposition with the cruelty
of youth and the Waste Land, so the line from
Verlaine is brought up against a tag from an Australian
ballad ;

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THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

‘O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter;

They wash their feet in soda water.’

Eliot’s method is justified, because he is entirely a
literary writer, so there is no great contrast between his
literary sensibility when it reacts to literature and when
it reacts to real phenomena. Indeed, the two uses are
sometimes combined, and even in his observation of real
phenomena he will put his finger on the description in
some book. For example, ‘Simple and faithless as a
smile and shake of the hand,’ from ‘Simple et sans foi
comme un bonjour.’

Eliot is the very opposite of everything that is meant
by a ‘nature poet.’ He is never, like Lawrence (who is a
genuine nature poet, as revolutionary in his power of
invoking an objective world as Wordsworth) describing
nature with his mind fixed on some object described,
making the reader re-experience all the sensations aroused
by that object. His mind is always on the poem, on what
is created by the mind, and he picks out the phenomena
observed by the mind, to suit the poem. He never appeals
to a material reality outside the mind: only, in his most
recent poems, to a world of belief that is external to the
individual mind.

I. A. Richards has said that in The Waste Land
T. S. Eliot has effected a ‘severance between his
poetry and all beliefs.’ . . . ‘ “In the destructive element
immerse. That is the way.’’ ’

I think that the last lines of The Fire Sermon section,
‘O Lord thou pluckest me out’ are not ‘severed’ from all
belief. But what Eliot most certainly has done is to
immerse himself in the destructive element. In The
Waste Land he has made an artistic whole out of frag-

T. S. ELIOT IN HIS POETRY

145

ments. The poem is not built on the blank verse or free
verse metres which are the basis of its separate parts.
The metre, so far from being architectural, helps to convey
the sense of fragmentariness in the poem. For example,
a few lines of the last section of What the Thunder Said:

‘Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink,’

are not sequentially related to the mood and rhythm of A
Game of Chess. The lines I have quoted read like some
fragment of rhetorical poetic drama: A Game of Chess
surprises us by its sensual, romantic mood, and Death By
Water may take the reader to the Greek Anthology.
These fragments are not related to each other, but to
the whole poem; they only contribute to each other in
falling apart, and always suggesting to us that they are
parts of something larger than their surroundings. We
are reminded of a ruined city in which the parts are all
disintegrated, yet still together form a whole. What
remains in our minds is the whole poem, which is related
to a series of fragments, not a series of fragments which
are collected together to construct a whole poem.

Instead of a basis of accepted belief, the whole structure
of Eliot’s poem is based on certain primitive rituals and
myths, which, he seems to feel, must be psychological
certainties, being a part of what psychologists call our
‘race memory.’ He is appealing to scientific legend,
where Yeats appeals to poetic legend. The authority
behind The Waste Land is not the Catholic Church, nor
romantic lore, but anthropology from the volumes of Sir

146 THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Eliot has tried to
indicate, beneath the very ephemeral and violent move-
ments of our own civilization, the gradual and magical
contours of man’s earliest religious beliefs. The effect
he sets out to achieve is illustrated by Freud’s remark in
Civilization and its Discontents that the growth of the
individual mind resembles the growth of Rome, supposing
that modern Rome, as it is to-day, were coexistent with
the buildings of Rome at every period in her history;
and that beneath the modern architecture was found the
architecture of every earlier period, in a perfect state of
preservation.

The method of The Waste Land is justified in so far
as it fulfils the psychological truth observed by Freud.
But Eliot’s way of doing this is perhaps a little too
studied. The poem seems to lean rather too heavily on
Sir James Frazer, and The Golden Bough tends to form a
private poem concealed in the real poem, in the same way
as Joyce’s private poem about the Odyssey is enshrined in
Ulysses. The work is very slightly tainted by the learning
of the Cambridge don. Perhaps the main reason for this
is that, although Eliot’s attitude is much more objective
and generalized in The Waste Land than in any earlier
poem, the psychology of his people is just as crude. His
ladies, his bank clerks, his Sweeneys, his Mrs. Porters,
his pub conversationalists, are all part of the world of
things. Psychologically they are far cruder than the
Babbitts and other creations of Sinclair Lewis. One
of the most astonishing things about Eliot is that a poet
with such a strong dramatic style should seem so blinded
to the existence of people outside himself. Yet the effect
of his poetry depends very largely on this blindness.

Eliot seems to think, quite rightly, that what makes
people living is their beliefs. But to him it seems im-

T. S. ELIOT IN HIS POETRY

147

possible to accept any belief that is not a religious belief :
one either rejects all belief, as I. A. Richards finds he has
done in The Waste Land, or else one accepts a religious
belief in salvation and damnation. Those who do not
accept this belief are not even damned, but eternally
dead. For that reason, the people about whom he writes
in his poems are dead, because they are not allowed to
hold with any conviction the small private beliefs which
are as many as people’s separate occupations. There is a
whole list of such beliefs in St. J. Perse’s Anabase, a
poem which Eliot himself has translated: ‘He who
sees his soul reflected in a blade; the man learned in
sciences, in anomastic; the well thought of in councils,
he who names fountains,’ etc. These are the living:
yet they seem to be shut out of Eliot’s poetry, because
‘to see his soul reflected in a blade’ puts a man outside
the pale even of the damned.

In front of Sweeney Agonistes there is a quotation
from St. John of the Cross : ‘Hence the soul cannot be
possessed of the divine union, until it has divested itself
of the love of created beings.’ This is coupled with a
quotation from the Choephoroe of ^schylus, where
Orestes says, speaking of the Furies, ‘You don’t see
them, you don’t — but I see them: they are hunting me
down, I must move on.’

These two fragments give a final picture of the haunted
world of Eliot’s early poetry, and of The Waste Land.
The characters, the prostitutes and their American pals,
are the dead. Their lives are automatic, their only
emotions are fear, and a primitive kind of superstition,
which occupies them with dealing and cutting packs of
cards. The interruption of the telephone with its repeated
‘Ting a ling ling’ does not break the jazz rhythm of
their talk.

THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

148

Here Eliot’s verse is bare of its beautiful effects, and
of all poetry. It is intricate, dramatic and ingenious.
Only in its organization is it superior to the thing it
parodies. Eventually, in the poetry of disillusion, the
parody becomes the thing parodied, in the same way as
in Auden’s Dance of Death the jazz songs are exactly
like real jazz songs by Noel Coward. The parody no
longer exists in the words, but in the dramatic
presentation of the characters who speak the words.

Here, in Sweeney’s lines, the poeticism is deliberately a
falsified poetry:

‘Nothing to eat but the fruit as it grows.

Nothing to see but the palm-trees one way

And the sea the other way.

Nothing to hear but the sound of the surf.

Nothing at all but three things.’

The verse only rises to poetry in the next lines :

‘doris: What things.?

SWEENEY: Birth, and copulation, and death.

That’s all, that’s all, that’s all, that’s all.
Birth, and copulation, and death.

DORIS: I’d be bored.

SWEENEY: You’d be bored.

Birth and copulation and death.’

Here the poetry rises to a kind of fierce, destructive
emphasis, the expression of a mechanism which is destroy-
ing itself.

The mood of The Waste Land could not go further
than in this poem, for here the bareness and dryness is
such that poetry would be poetically false. It is a kind of

T. S. ELIOT IN HIS POETRY

149

reductio ud absurdum. ha ve reached a stage when

poetr y refuses to be poet t^ ' — "

' fiTtHe'spInr^ theterrible quotation from St. John of
the Cross, all the possibilities of a human poetry are
exhausted. With the exception of Sweeney, haunted by
the Furies, the characters in these two fragments are
non-human, they are bones.

In Ash Wednesday^ even this ghostly human element
has disappeared. The poet has now escaped from Dusty,
Horsfall, Klipstein, Swarts, and Doris. His isolated
journey has taken him from the drawing-rooms frequented
by Prufrock, through the Waste Land, and past the
Furies, into a kind of Paradiso. The new environment is
as literary as were the old ones; in fact it owes much to
Dante, as has been pointed out. But there is another
influence, of perhaps even greater significance, and that
is the late Beethoven.

The music of Beethoven’s last Quartets, Opera 130,
1 3 1, 132 and 135, and the Grosse Fugue, are the supreme
artistic creations of a spirit in isolation, ‘divested of the
love of created beings’; although with Beethoven the
‘divesting’ was an accident of his extreme misanthropy,
his illogical love for his nephew, his deafness, his genius :
it was not a deliberate achievement.

The life-work of Beethoven is in itself a whole epoch
of musical history. If we were to compare any part of
English literature with the work of Beethoven, we would
have to suppose that, included under one writer’s name,
was, in an early period, the work of the Elizabethans,
in a later period, the disillusion of such poetry as The
Waste Land. The development of Beethoven is even
more astonishing than that of Shakespeare, although it is
not so wide and human. His music, at first dependent
on Mozart, advanced so far and so dynamically in

150 THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

directions quite unprecedented in music, that it is as
though he invented a whole tradition of his own, because
he practically disregarded the tradition of Bach’s greatest
achievements. Not only did he construct the architecture
of a tradition that supported the great Symphonies, but,
in his own work, he wore out that tradition. His last
work is like a voice amongst the ruins of his own music.
These quartets, these last sonatas, have none of the
objectivity, the symmetry and structure of the works of
the middle period. They are simply the expression of a
unique personality, one man’s isolated experience in a
world that seems almost beyond pleasure and pain, and
that can only be heard; it cannot in any way be described.
The architectural technique that formerly, like the
Spenserian stanza, stood outside of, although as part of,
the music, yet always existing in its own right, has now
been destroyed, and the technical device has become
unified with the expression, rising and falling with it, to
record this man’s experience, ‘divested of the love of
created beings.’

Certain of these effects in the late Beethoven Quartets
remind me so much of Ash Wednesday that it is perhaps
worth while to record them. For example, in the second
section of the poem, there is a sudden break in the
metre from a very long line to a very short one : the very
short line is maintained for twenty-two verses, and then
there follows another passage of seven verses in the
first metre:

‘. . . The Lady is withdrawn
In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget

T. S. ELIOT IN HIS POETRY

151

Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And GJod
said

Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping
With the burden of the grasshopper, saying

Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied.

The Second Movement of Beethoven’s Quartet, Opus
130 in A Minor, shows an effect which is echoed in
these lines. The long-drawn-out notes of the opening
bars are followed by a sustained, very light, very quick,
almost shrill passage; this passage closes, and the music
reverts to the first clear and solemn harmony.

J. W. N. Sullivan has said in his book on Beethoven
that the peculiarity of these late Quartets is often in their
extraordinary conjunctions of mood. One can only
describe the mood sometimes (for example, in the presto
of the Quartet in B Flat Major) as one of gay melan-
choly; the Cavatina of the same Quartet is in a mood of
rapt sadness.

THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

152

I am reminded of these effects several times in Eliot’s
poem. For example, in such lines as :

‘And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broad-backed figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.’

I turn now to Eliot’s critical essays.

VIII

T. S. ELIOT IN HIS CRITICISM

In After Strange Gods, Eliot alludes to the apparent dis-
crepancy which critics have found between his poetry
and his critical prose. Tt would appear that while I
maintain the most correct opinions in my criticism, I do
nothing but violate them in my verse; and thus appear
in a double, if not a double-faced r6le.'

This, and the alternative view that his poetry is to be
admired and his prose lamented, are usual opinions. The
assumption always is that his verse and prose are quite
unrelated to each other.

Actually, they are very closely related. If one reads
through the whole of the prose and the whole of the verse,
one finds that the same process, the same search for a
Tradition and for orthodox principles, combined with the
same sensitivity to contemporary life, is developed through
both of them. In the essays there are frequent references
(they grow more open as time goes on) to problems in
which the writer himself is involved in his creative
work. A certain light relief is provided, if the reader
is curious enough to wonder whether there be any
connexion between the following two passages. The
first is a discussion of the way in which a poet may
select his imagery.^

‘And this selection probably runs through the whole
of his sensitive life. There might be the experience of a
child of ten, a small boy peering through sea-water in a
1 The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, p. 78.

153

154

THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

rock-pool, and finding a sea-anemone for the first time:
the simple experience (not so simple, for an exceptional
child, as it looks) might be dormant in his mind for
twenty years, and reappear transformed in some verse-
context charged with great imaginative pressure.’

The second is from the Rhapsody on a Windy Night:

‘I could see nothing behind that child’s eye.

I have seen eyes in the street

Trying to peer through lighted shutters.

And a crab one afternoon in a pool.

An old crab with barnacles on his back.

Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.’

In its relation to the philosophy which forms the
background of his poetry, some of the criticism is most
illuminating. Particularly the essays on Baudelaire and
Dante, for Dante is the poet whose writing and attitude
fulfil most of the conditions which Eliot, in his last
essays, has come to impose on the artist. He is Christian,
moral, orthodox and traditional. Without Dante, as the
supreme example of an orthodox writer. After Strange
Gods could hardly have been written. Baudelaire, on the
other hand, provides the machinery of the modern
Inferno : and he is also to Eliot an example of the Christian
writer. The Introduction to Baudelaire’s Intimate
Journal^ shows how, unless Baudelaire had decided to
be damned, it would have been more difficult for Eliot
to set out on the path of salvation. Lastly, there are the
critical writings of T. E. Hulme. The paragraph which
Eliot quotes at the end of this same Introduction needs
no comment:

Tn the light of these absolute values, man himself is
^ This essay is now published in the volume of Selected Essays.

T. S. ELIOT IN HIS CRITICISM 155

judged to be essentially limited and imperfect. He is
endowed with Original Sin. While he can occasionally
accomplish acts which partake of perfection, he can never
himself be perfect. Certain secondary results in regard to
ordinary human action in society follow from this. A man
is essentially bad, he can only accomplish anything of
value by discipline — ethical and political. Order is thus
not merely negative, but creative and liberating. In-
stitutions are necessary.’

Thus in Dante, Baudelaire, T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound,
the Elizabethans, and a half-dozen other influences, one
sees the background of Eliot’s poetry in Eliot’s prose.
The poetry and the prose together form a whole; the
poetry is strengthened and given its ideals by the prose,
the prose is illustrated and given foundation by the poetry.
Perhaps this explains a puzzling sentence in After Strange
Gods: ‘I should say that in one’s prose reflexions one may
be legitimately occupied with ideals, whereas in the writing
of verse one can only deal with actuality.’

His prose is not confined to criticism, and perhaps
some of the most important parts of his criticism occur
in his poetry. For his poetry is literary and full of
quotation, and his use of the passages which he quotes
implies a critical attitude. We look in the essays for
criticism of the Elizabethans which concerns their
ideals : in Gerontion and The fVaste Land for the criticism
which emphasizes their historic actuality.

The pervading weakness of Eliot’s writing is a certain
fragmentariness: ‘These fragments I have shored against
my ruins,’ in The Waste Land^ and:

‘Because I cannot hope to turn again

Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something

Upon which to rejoice,’

^ o

156 THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

from Ash Wednesday^ are lines which, without any weak-
ness, yet ‘give him away,* because they are so true. In
his poetry he is an inhibited writer, exploiting in himself
a tendency in his own work to break off just when the
reader is expecting him to become most lucid, and making
of this tendency a technical device. His prose, in spite
of its logical precision, its dryness, and its fine organiza-
tion, is, in its context, uneven: occasionally there are
remarks of brilliant observation, of violent prejudice, or
whole paragraphs of sententiousness.

The poetry and the prose to some extent bolster each
other up, and are interdependent. The thought that has
led the poetry on from stage to stage has been developed
in the prose. The prose itself, though, has weakness:
for Eliot is not very good at argument or at abstract
discussion, and it is the poetry that illuminates and
justifies his ideas. Without his poetry, the religious and
social opinions in his last two critical works would seem
ineffective, and perhaps unimportant.

Both poetry and prose combine to produce the im-
pression of an extraordinarily conscientious writer, who
is prepared to work out all the ideas which form the
background of his poetry, and risk applying this ‘ideology’
to Church, politics and social life. He and Yeats are the
first English poets of this century who seem to have
realized that if the beliefs which govern a poet when he
is writing, are hopelessly removed from the beliefs on
which contemporary society and the law are based, then
his poetry will seem remote from the life around him.
The poet is driven either into an attitude of eccentric
and defiant individualism, or else he must try and work
out his ideas and relate them to society. Eliot has there-
fore explained his position very carefully, and any
criticism of that position is relevant to his poetry.

T. S. ELIOT IN HIS CRITICISM 157

Unfortunately, though, his explanations are not quite
simple. His conscience seems to have driven him to
work out every step in his development, but it has not
enabled him to overcome a certain ambiguity. To take
a very obvious example, it is difficult for a writer who
hates an age of usefulness, of birth-control, hygiene,
and business, to recommend efficient institutions and
forms of behaviour : when he recommends the advice on
Birth Control of the Lambeth Conference, or that the
censorship should be directed from Lambeth Palace, one
has to remember that such remedies may appeal to him
simply because he is reacting from an utilitarian age.

The very first essay in The Sacred Wood., on Tradition
and The Individual Talent, might lead one to think that
Eliot was to live contentedly among the apostles of
‘art for art’s sake,’ brought up to date by Bloomsbury,
and called ‘significant form.’ For he offers a neat formula
to illustrate the creation of poetry: ‘Consider, as a sug-
gestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit
of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber
containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.’

Michael Roberts has shown that what we are led to
suppose happens in this experiment does not really
happen at all; T. S. Eliot also darkly hints in a later
passage that there is ‘at least one doubtful analogy’ in
this essay: but nevertheless, if one has faith, in the mind’s
eye such scientific experiments come off. ‘When the
two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence
of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid.
The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may
partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the
man himself; but the more perfect the artist, the more
completely separate in him will be the man who suffers
and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will

158 THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

the mind digest and transmute the passions which arc
its material.’

The essay is in fact a vigorous attack on critics who
maintain that poetry is the expression of personality, and
at the same time it is a defence of tradition. Although
the essay is convincingly argued there is a certain doubt
left as to its intention.

Firstly, it is rather difficult to understand why Eliot is
so much on the defensive about tradition. For, if he is
on the defensive, if his purpose is, like Henry James’s,
to hold up a Continental example to the English, he
over-proves his case. Because he proves that, without
tradition as an element in the chemical formula, poetry
cannot exist. Therefore tradition is a sine qua non, and
it is difficult to see how some poetry can be ‘more tradi-
tional’ than other poetry, except in the sense that it is
better or worse, which is, in fact, the sense in which Eliot
uses the word traditional. But he does not seem quite
happy at letting the reader know he is doing this.

Now, if good poetry is more traditional than bad
poetry, the use of the word traditional immediately
becomes very dubious, because many of the best poets
are obviously not learned. This so worries Eliot that he
immediately adopts the tone, on the one hand mystifying,
on the other hand almost sneering, which is typical of
him in moments when he is least certain of himself. The
reader is sneered at for thinking that tradition is something
which a really great poet, like Shakespeare, has to acquire :
in case he should dispute this, he is then heavily snubbed
by a remark to the effect that less great poets have to
work hard to gain a sense of the traditional. ‘Tradition . . .
cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain
it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the
historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable

T. S. ELIOT IN HIS CRITICISM

159

to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his
twenty-fifth year.* Don’t dare to dispute this, he might
have added, unless your name is Shakespeare.

This happens to be very true, but the fact remains that
Eliot has altered his position. He is not, like Henry
James, making a criticism of the whole of English
literature, although he leaves plenty of room for one to
think that perhaps he is doing so. What he is really
saying is simply that bad poetry is not traditional, and
that good poetry is traditional. Further, since he admits
that there is no way by which one can examine a poet
and discover him to be untraditional, ‘untraditional’
becomes simply a term of abuse which one reserves for
generally accepted poetry which one doesn’t happen to
like, such as Shelley. It seems rather an elaborate way
of bolstering up one’s dislikes.

Later on we are told: ‘The point of view which I am
struggling to attach is perhaps related to the meta-
physical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for
the meaning is that the poet has, not a ‘personality’ to
express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium
and not a personality, in which impressions and ex-
periences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.’

This is very striking, and it seems to answer satisfactorily
the point of view which Eliot opposes, because it refutes
altogether the conception of an expressed personality,
and reduces it to meaninglessness. Yet two pages further
on he says: ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion,
but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression
of personality, but an escape from personality.’ ^

But an escape from personality, which is an escape
from emotion, is an expression of personality. It is
evident that Eliot is saying in other words what a great
* Selected Essays, p. 20.

i6o THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

many people mean when they speak of an ‘expression
of personality’: a fairly impersonal state of mind in
which one is able to regard the emotions of one’s
personality objectively: but this is only a degree of
introspection.

A significant aspect of this essay is the omission of
all discussion of the part played by either nature or the
objective world in poetry. Eliot’s view of aesthetic creation
seems to be purely cerebral : the outer world of reality is
viewed either as digested experience, or else as ‘im-
pressions’: impressions that only seem important for
what they impress on the mind, without regard for the
reality which is doing the impressing. We may well
wonder how this formula suits Whitman, or the D. H.
Lawrence of Birds, Beasts and Flowers. It certainly does
not fit Lawrence’s poetry at all, and Whitman only
after a straining which renders the meaning of the word
‘traditional’ very vague. The fact is that Eliot has quite
ignored the kind of artist whose creativeness is stimulated
by a perpetual tension between the objective world, the
world of nature, and his own inner world: and this
consciousness of the world outside is the only real
impersonality. To Eliot, as to most modern writers,
nature, except in the sense of Georgian nature poetry,
does not seem to exist. When one notices this, one also
begins to understand certain of Eliot’s dislikes. His
dislike of Lawrence seems inevitable, but his dislike
even of Goethe becomes a little clearer when one
considers how unsympathetic to the cerebral writer
must be such lines as the following from Faust'.

‘Vom Eise befreit sind Strom und Bache

Durch des Frtihlings holden, belebenden Blick;

Im Thale grttnet Hoffnungs-Gltick;

T. S. ELIOT IN HIS CRITICISM i6i

Der alte Winter, in seiner Schwache,

Zog sich in rauhe Berge zuriick.

Von dorther sendet er fliehend nur
Ohnmachtige Schauer kornigen Eises
In Streifen liber die griinende Flur;

Aber die Sonne duldet kein Weisses,

Uberall regt sich Bildung und Streben,

Alles will sie mit Farben beleben;

Doch an Blumen fehlt’s im Revier,

Sie nimmt geputzte Menschen dafttr.'

In Eliot’s essay there seems to be little feeling that a
sense of tradition can be derived from the conditions of life
round the poet; that his audience, or his potential audience,
is, as it were, the carrier of tradition, and that he is the one
infected. Nor is there, as yet, any feeling that tradition may
be found in the Church, or, as we find it in Henry James,
amongst an aristocracy. It is to be found in books.

In later essays, he endeavours always to trace the line
of tradition in literature, and this, of course, leads him
eventually away from books, to the contemporary social
environment of the writers whom he is discussing, to
morals, and, lastly, to theology. A more critical and less
analytic attitude to English literature is adopted. One of
his exponents in the Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry even
hints at the possibility that Shakespeare is not traditional
enough, because of his lack of an ordered social back-
ground. ‘Restoration Comedy is a comedy of social
manners. It presupposes the existence of a society,
therefore of social and moral laws. ... It laughs at the
members of society who transgress its laws. The tragedy
of Shakespeare goes much deeper and yet it tells us only
that weakness of character leads to disaster. There is no
such background of social order such as you perceive

i 62

THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

behind Corneille and Sophocles.’ Then, again: ‘So far
as I can isolate Shakespeare, I prefer him to all other
dramatists of every time. But I cannot do that altogether;
and I find the age of Shakespeare moved in a steady
current, with back-eddies certainly, towards anarchy and
chaos. And lastly: ‘You can never draw the line between
aesthetic criticism and moral and social criticism; you
cannot draw a line between criticism and metaphysics;
you start with literary criticism, and however rigorous an
aesthete you may be, you are over the frontier into some-
thing else sooner or later.’^ After this, it is clear that Eliot
himself is over the frontier: it becomes a question of the
sense in which he is a moralist and a metaphysician.

The best and most renowned of Eliot’s essays are
those on the Elizabethans. It is when we come to the
essay on Blake that we notice suddenly the sharp division
of his opinion. For whilst we are told that Blake benefited
from his lack of systematic education, and that The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell is ‘naked philosophy,
presented,’ we are told later that ‘we have the same
respect for Blake’s philosophy (and perhaps for that of
Samuel Butler) that we have for an ingenious piece of
home-made furniture: we admire the man who has put
it together out of the odds and ends about the house.’
Now Samuel Butler is certainly not ‘naked philosophy,
presented,’ and his conjunction with Blake is absurd:
it is a tentative effort to disparage Blake, to ‘take him
down a peg,’ and the reason for Eliot’s annoyance soon
becomes clear, when he adds censoriously: ‘We are not
really so remote from the Continent, or from our own past,
as to be deprived of the advantages of culture, if we wish
them.’ He ignores the fact that Blake had excellent
reasons for not ‘wishing them.’

* Selected Essays, p. 53. * Ibid. 55.

T. S. ELIOT IN HIS CRITICISM 163

The remark that Blake’s philosophy resembles a piece
of home-made furniture is ingenious and unjust, nor
does it explain why he was not as great an artist as
Beethoven, for instance, whose philosophy was also
‘home-made.’ As so often happens with Eliot, he seems
to diagnose with great acuteness, and then is anxious to
suggest some cure; but the cure has no relation to the
illness. He goes on to say: ‘Blake was endowed with a
capacity for considerable understanding of human nature,
with a remarkable and original sense of language and
the music of language, and a gift of hallucinated vision.
Had these been controlled by a respect for impersonal
vision, for common sense, for the objectivity of science,
it would have been better for him.’ That is the suggested
cure. It is more than a cure, in fact, it is a panacea.
Blake, Shelley, Goethe, D. H. Lawrence, all of them
lacked that little something which Eliot expresses in
different ways, but which in the servants’ hall would
be described as ‘knowing one’s place.’

The fault with Blake is that he is ‘up to twenty,
decidedly a traditional.’ But after twenty things started
to go wrong. Here we encounter the oddest and most
personal note in Eliot’s criticism. This is a note of almost
personal irritation with the writers whom he is criticizing,
so strongly does he feel that they oughtn’t to be doing
something which they do, but something quite different.
The great Victorians oughtn’t (as we all know) to
have written so much. Goethe oughtn’t to have written
poetry at all : ‘his true role was that of the man of the
world and sage— a La Rochefoucauld, a La Bruy^re, a
Vauvenargues.’^ One feels that he is never quite satisfied
with any English writer, except some of the metaphysical
poets, and Pope and Dryden. The others never quite
* The Use of Poetry tsnd the Use of Criticism, p. 99.

i 64 three individualists

obey all the rules, and, of course, they are never nearly
‘traditional’ enough.

The search for principles, the perpetual sacrifice of
what he calls personality, and the study of tradition, led
Eliot to the conclusion that one could make no aesthetic
judgment which did not imply a moral judgment; and
this same path was one perhaps of many that led him
finally to theology.

His conclusions attempt to refute the charge that they
are themselves home-made, or that they are individualistic,
by being rigidly orthodox, and they attempt also to be
practical. That is to say they broaden into a social
philosophy, and in his more recent criticism he has
applied that philosophy to questions outside literary
criticism.

It is these practical conclusions that form the test of
his traditionalism: for it is evident that no tradition is
wholly valid that is not rooted in contemporary life as
much as in the life of the past. In one of his recently
published American lectures, Eliot very rightly disputes
the commonly held view that Wordsworth’s opinions are
unimportant and unrelated to his poetry: ‘I am not sure
that this critical eclecticism cannot go too far: that we
can judge and enjoy a man’s poetry while leaving wholly
out of account all of the things for which he cared deeply,
and on behalf of which he turned his poetry to account.’^

Eliot’s own opinions are not merely related to his
poetry. They qualify his whole critical attitude, and
they make him to some extent a preacher. His aim as a
writer has been to be a traditionalist: the tradition which
he has adopted, being derived from the Church, has also
sociological and educative implications. It is his object
to show that the application of these principles in social
1 Tie Use of Poetry and tie Use of Criticism, p. 8i,

T. S. ELIOT IN HIS CRITICISM 165

life is as just as it is correct to apply them to literature.
He seems to feel that unless he can prove this, he is, in
his work, an individualist: not a traditionalist radically
connected with the historic process: but isolated, original,
personal, in the sense that he is writing about his own
beliefs which are ‘home-made,’ and so make him eccentric,
and different from the people around him.

Whereas the Marxist tries to accomplish the same
sacrifice of individualist traits in order to achieve the
fulfilment of a more united and wider humanity, by an
historic act of the will which makes him reach forward and
forcibly impose on the present the visualized, completed
social system of the future, Eliot looks to the Church,
and finds it the single enduring building which survives
in the chaos of our civilization. If it is not as powerful
in a worldly sense as it was, that is only regrettable in
the view of those who are concerned for civilization in
this world: for its teachings and its sacraments survive,
and their real emphasis lies not on life but on death:
moreover, it does offer the only surviving hope for our
civilization : ‘The world is trying the experiment of
attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality.
The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in
awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so
that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark
ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save
the World from suicide.’^

Sometimes, however, he seems to despair of civilization :
‘Perhaps he (Matthew Arnold) cared too much for
civilization, forgetting that Heaven and Earth shall pass
away, and Mr. Arnold with them, and there is only one
stay,’® So that he is not so sure about civilization, after all.

* Selected Essays, p. 363.

® The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, p. 119.

i66 THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

This is a doctrine of Death. The implication is that
probably civilization is at an end, but there is still the
Church. The Church, though, is a ruin, and is probably
incapable of saving the world even if the world wants to
be saved, and Mr. Arnold is reproached for seeming to
want salvation on earth; the strength of the Church lies
in the fact that it has another life to offer.

Meanwhile, there are certain remedies and palliatives
that Eliot shows. For example, that married couples
should take the advice of priests as to the exercise of
Birth Control. ‘Here, if anywhere, is definitely a matter
upon which the Individual Conscience is no reliable
guide; spiritual guidance should be imperative; and it
should be clearly placed above medical advice— where
also, opinions and theories vary indefinitely.’^ As though
the uncertainty of medicine were a motive for putting
the matter in the care of those who may know nothing
whatever about it. He proposes that the censorship, if
it exist at all, should be at Lambeth Palace. A certain
vindictive Puritanism is revealed in these lines :
‘Thought, study, mortification, sacrifice: it is such
notions as these that should be impressed upon the
young.’*

It is for such opinions that Eliot will be judged by
those who read his prose, and who, perhaps seeking
guides, live in the belief that there is only one thing
now which is worth doing, and that is to create a new and
better civilization.

In After Strange Gods, Eliot has restated his traditional
faith, extending it considerably beyond the world of
literature. ‘What I mean by tradition involves all those
habitual actions, habits and customs, from the most
significant religious rite to our conventional way of
1 Selected Essays, p. 351. * Wd. p. 349.

T. S. ELIOT IN HIS CRITICISM 167

greeting a stranger, which represent the blood kinship
of the ‘same people living in the same place.’ Certain
conclusions are drawn from this. ‘The population should
be homogeneous; where two or more cultures exist in
the same place they are likely either to become fiercely
self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is
still more important is unity of religious background;
and reasons of race and religion combine to make any
large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable. There
must be a proper balance between urban and rural,
industrial and agricultural development. And a spirit of
excessive tolerance is to be deprecated.’^

So much for Internationalism. It is hardly necessary
to point out that although Eliot is not a fascist,
there is no sentence in this paragraph with which
Mussolini, Hitler, and Mosley would not thoroughly
agree. They would probably tolerate even the mild
amount of ragging they get in The Rock from such an
ally; just as they are prepared to tolerate a certain amount
from the Church. The doctrine is not Catholic or
Protestant. It has no echo in Renaissance Italy or in the
teachings of the Church which claimed to stand above
all cultures and local characteristics, and to unite all
peoples. Nor does it apply to our own history since the
Reformation. It is in fact an Old Testament doctrine
suited to the intense nationalism and racial self-sufficiency
of the Chosen People. There is nothing in the New
Testament to correspond to it.

In order to illustrate the necessity of a tradition, and
of orthodoxy, he picks out, in After Strange Gods, more
or less at random, three short stories by modern writers.
The stories are Bliss by Katherine Mansfield, The Shadow
in the Rose Garden by D. H. Lawrence, and The Dead
^ After Strange GoJsy p. 20.

i68 THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

by James Joyce. The choice is fortunate, in that all the
stories concern the same subject; the disillusionment,
in the case of the story by Katherine Mansfield, of a wife
in her relations with her husband, and, in the case of the
two men writers, of a husband with his wife. It is rather
less fortunate that the stories are of very unequal merit,
especially as Joyce’s story is the best of his first period,
and the story by Lawrence is one of his weakest.

Eliot then proceeds to give Katherine Mansfield’s
story highest marks : ‘Our satisfaction recognizes the skill
with which the author has handled perfectly the minimum
material — it is what I believe would be called feminine.’
However, ‘We are given neither comment nor suggestion
of any moral issue of good and evil, and within the setting
this is quite right.’ This seems to me self-contradictory:
I suppose it has the object of criticizing the story be-
cause it is not moral, and thus relating it to the other two
stories, and at the same time acquitting Eliot of having
made this criticism because it is admitted that ‘within
the setting this is quite right.’

So that Katherine Mansfield is really out of the running
in this competition. The real conflict is between Lawrence
and Joyce. Eliot objects to Lawrence’s story, because of
a strain of wilful cruelty in it. Here is his version of the
story:

‘An accident, trifling in itself, but important in the
twist which Lawrence gives to it, leads or forces the wife
to reveal to her commonplace lower-middle-class lover
(no writer is more conscious of class-distinctions than
Lawrence) the facts of her intrigue with an army officer
several years before their marriage. The disclosure is
made with something approaching conscious cruelty.
There is cruelty, too, in the circumstances in which she
has met her former lover:

T. S. ELIOT IN HIS CRITICISM 169

‘And I saw him to-day,’ she said. ‘He is not dead,
he’s mad.’ Her husband looked at her, startled. ‘Mad!’
he said involuntarily. ‘A lunatic,’ she said.

Eliot comments : ‘What I wish chiefly to notice at this
point, is what strikes me in all the relations of Lawrence’s
men and women: the absence of any moral or social
sense.’^

Now to say that Lawrence’s men and women have no
moral and social sense is simply untrue. The object of
the present story is to show that the wife, having been
in love with the soldier who became a lunatic, was in
a false relationship to her husband. Lawrence’s belief is
that false and artificial relationships must be destroyed:
and that if they are destroyed, an enduring tender and
human relationship may spring up. Eliot does not
mention in his account of this story that the real shadow
in the rose garden is the war. The war with its blind and
destructive cruelty is the presence in their minds which
has made their marriage false : if they are to be rid of the
falsity, they are obliged not to evade it. Eliot does not
so much as refer to the last paragraph in the story, which
explains what is the new relationship between the husband
and the wife :

‘He stood and looked at her. At last he had learned
the width of the breach between them. She still squatted
on the bed. It would be a violation to each of them
to be brought into contact with each other. The thing
must work itself out. They were both shocked so much,
they were impersonal, and no longer hated each other.
After some minutes he left her and went out.’

I fail to see the conscious cruelty in this conclusion.
However, in the volume of stories called Dubliners by
James Joyce, from which Eliot has singled out The
1 After Strange Gods, p. 36.

lyo THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

Dead as a model of orthodoxy, there is one called The
Encounter which seems to have been written from no
inspiration except cruelty. It relates how two boys take
a day off from school in order to search for adventures:
it describes a few of the incidents of their day, and then
how, as they are resting in a field, a man approaches them
and enters into a conversation: ‘The man continued his
monologue. He seemed to have forgotten his recent
liberalism. He said that if ever he found a boy talking
to girls or having a girl for a sweetheart he would whip
him and whip him; and that would teach him not to be
talking to girls. And if a boy had a girl for a sweetheart
and told lies about it, then he would give him a whipping
such as no boy ever got in this world. He said there was
nothing in this world he would like so well as that. He
described to me how he would whip such a boy, as if
he were unfolding some elaborate mystery.’ I only men-
tion this story to show that the attacks on Thomas Hardy
and Lawrence for morbidity can hardly be maintained,
in order to uphold the consistent kindheartedness of
Joyce. Joyce is certainly a moral writer, but so are
Lawrence and Hardy: all three writers have it in
common that they are sometimes interested in describing
pure sensations, accidents in life which seem to have no
moral associations.

The Dead is a beautiful and tender work, fully de-
serving the praise which Eliot gives to it. I again quote
his summary, because it is better than any I could write
myself:

‘In Mr. Joyce’s story . . . the wife is saddened by
memories associated with a song sung at an evening
party which has just been described in minute detail.
In response to solicitous questions by her husband, she
reveals the fact that the song had been sung by a boy she

T. S. ELIOT IN HIS CRITICISM 171

knew in Galway when she was a girl, and that between
them was an intense romantic and spiritualized love. She
had had to go away; the boy had risen from a sickbed to
come to say good-bye to her; and he had in consequence
died. That is all there was to it; but the husband realizes
that what this boy had given her was something finer
than anything he had ever to give. And as the wife falls
asleep at last:

‘Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never
felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew
that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered
more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he
imagined he saw the form of a young man standing
under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His
soul had approached that region where dwell the vast
hosts of the dead!’

Eliot comments : ‘We are not concerned with the author’s
beliefs, but with orthodoxy of sensibility and with the sense
of tradition, our degree of approaching the “region
where dwell the vast hosts of the dead.’’ And Lawrence
is, for my purposes, an almost perfect example of the
heretic. And the most ethically orthodox of the more
eminent writers of my time is Mr. Joyce. I confess that
I do not know what to make of a generation which ignores
these considerations.’^

The traditionalism of this very beautiful story seems
for Eliot to consist mainly in the fact that it is about the
dead. Yet this is a confusion, because no subject could
be less in the specifically English tradition than this story.
The plot is sentimental, for the concession which Gabriel
makes— that the love of this boy, because he died and
because it was spiritualized, is hopelessly superior to the
love of the man who lived — is false. The preoccupation
^ After Strange Gods, p. 37.

172 THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

with death which distinguishes the story and alters its
values, so that, in spite of the situation, the treatment is
not sentimental, is Catholic and Irish. It is therefore
curious that Eliot goes on to explain the decay of modern
English literature in terms of the decay of Protestantism.
The only really traditional writer he has found is not a
Protestant but a Catholic. Lawrence is taken, I suppose,
as the chief example of Protestantism in decay. I
may note, in parenthesis, that all these arguments are
heralded by announcements that ‘we are not concerned
with the author’s beliefs,’ that his thesis does not lead
to a ‘theological conclusion,’ which are particularly con-
fusing. Poor Mrs. Lawrence gets a great deal of blame :
‘the vague hymn-singing pietism which seems to have
consoled the miseries of Lawrence’s mother, and which
does not seem to have provided her with any firm prin-
ciples by which to scrutinize the conduct of her son.’
Whether, if Mrs. Lawrence had gone to the spikiest
church in Eastwood, Nottingham, Eliot would have
found more to approve of in the books of her son, one
may doubt. I suspect that his dislike of Mrs. Lawrence
is fundamentally the same as his objection to Goethe,
Shelley, and the rest; her son did not know his place.

The difficulty is that Eliot’s victory for Joyce over
Lawrence is too facile. We are told that Joyce is a
traditionalist, and we agree that he is the very conscious
follower of a Latin-European tradition, and that his true
predecessor in English was Henry James. The Altar of
the Dead has all the virtues which Eliot admires in Joyce’s
story. The Dead.

To call Joyce a traditionalist means a lot, but to call
Lawrence a heretic means nothing. For if the tradition is
all that matters, it finally disposes of Lawrence as a serious
writer. On the other hand, if Lawrence does matter.

T. S. ELIOT IN HIS CRITICISM 173

then we have got to revise our use of the word tradition,
and the machine that Eliot has constructed falls to pieces.
We remember his curious remark that Blake was only
traditional ‘up to the age of twenty.’ After that he
became not a classic— like Dante— but ‘only a poet of
genius.’ Perhaps a part of the English tradition is to
produce artists who are only poets of genius.

When it comes to deploring D. H. Lawrence’s religious
upbringing, to finding that Joyce’s work is ‘pene-
trated with Christian feeling,’ that Yeats’s supernatural
world is ‘the wrong supernatural world,’ and finding
that in the case of Gerard Manley Hopkins ‘to be con-
verted ... is not going to do for a man, as a writer,
what his ancestry and country for some generations have
failed to do’;^ then the questions of belief, race, and
education are bound to arise. For the virtue of Joyce
seems to be in his Jesuit upbringing, from which, in all
his writings, he has so publicly revolted. Eliot is intro-
ducing a new standard of snobbery into English criticism
if, when we compare the merits of Lawrence, Joyce, and
Hopkins, we have to consider where each was educated,
and what was the Aryan faith of his parents. This is,
I suppose, all a part of the ‘struggle, in a word, against
Liberalism.’ A struggle which, in what Eliot calls ‘the
major intellectual centres of Europe,’ has already met with
such striking success that for a traditionalist to continue
it in England seems almost like flogging a dead horse.

So if we do not wish to simplify our judgments of
Eliot by simply labelling him a reactionary, we must
turn to the question of his belief. It is clear that he
requires orthodoxy of writers in a Christian sense. ‘I
. . . suggest that with the disappearance of the idea of
Original Sin, with the disappearance of the idea of intense
1 After Strange Godi, p. 47.

174 THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

moral struggle, the human beings presented to us both
in poetry and prose fiction to-day, and more patently
among the serious writers than in the underworld of
letters, tend to become less and less real.’

We may accept this as a definite conclusion. Then
challenge it with the question: Are the Russian Liberal
novelists, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev, notorious for hav-
ing created less and less real characters It seems to me
that there can only be one answer to this question. And
this answer leads to the conclusion that Eliot’s orthodoxy
has led his criticism very far astray.

Eliot’s traditionalism provides us with no critical
standards which we can apply to writers who are not
orthodox Christians, in the sense in which he under-
stands the word Christianity.

In order to illustrate the decline of modern moral
and religious standards, he ends his book with some
examples of heresy. He missed one which comes out
of classic America and which is flagrantly perfect. It is
from Moby Dick: T was a good Christian; born and bred
in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church. How,
then, could I unite with this wild idolator in worshipping
his piece of wood.? but what is worship.? thought I. Do
you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God
of heaven and earth— pagans and all included— can
possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood .?
Impossible! But what is worship.? — to do the will of
God }—that is worship. And what is the will of God .?—
to do to my fellow-man what I would have my fellow-man
do to me— that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is
my fellow-man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg
would do to me.? Why, unite with me in my particular
Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must
then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator.

T. S. ELIOT IN HIS CRITICISM 175

So I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the innocent
little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with Queequeg;
salaamed before him twice or thrice; kissed his nose;
and that done, we undressed and went to bed, at peace
with our own consciences and all the world. But we did
not go to sleep without some little chat.’

IX

NOTES ON D. H. LAWRENCE

T HERE is some truth in Wyndham Lewis’s criticism of
D. H. Lawrence that Tn his devotion to that romantic
abdominal Within he abandoned the sunlit pagan surface
of the earth.’^

This needs qualifying, for Lawrence at no stage
abandoned ‘the sunlit pagan surface’; his last work, The
Man Who Died, is as full of it as anything he wrote,
but it is quite true that his greatness as a writer lies in
his choice of the external world as a subject, and that he
was less consistent in his account of the inner life. That
is to say, the real consistency of everything he wrote,
every poem, novel, or essay, lies in his description of
the ‘surface of the world’ as sunlit, and as independent
of the observer, and as intrinsically living as a landscape
of Van Gogh. A page of description from The White
Peacock, one of the poems from Birds, Beasts and Flowers,
the description of the porcupine in Reflections on the
Death oj a Porcupine, a page from The Virgin and the
Gipsy, all have this same pervasion of strength and
brilliance. Take a few lines from The Snake:

‘He lifted his head from his drinking as cattle do,

And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do.

And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips,
and mused a moment.

And stopped and drank a little more,

^ Men without Art, p. 121.

176

NOTES ON D. H. LAWRENCE

177

Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning
bowels of the earth

On the day of the Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.’

This is so vivid that one feels almost that Lawrence is
the snake, but without the snake being in the least
Lawrence.

It is quite true that when the word ‘dark’ occurs,
these poems seem to lose their hardness, we seem on the
verge of some confusion, some immensity of nausea.
What Lawrence is trying to convey is a sensation, and he
is never content to indicate it. It is not that he is unable
to indicate it, for when he writes three lines about the
eagle, ‘inward’ as they are, they take one’s breath away:

‘You never look at the sun with your two eyes.

Only the inner eye of your scorched broad breast

Looks straight at the sun.’

No one could mistake this for anything but an eagle
or a hawk. But when he goes on in the next verse to
speak about ‘dark cleaving down,’ and, in the verse after
that, about the ‘dark face-weapon,’ the eagle becomes con-
fused with the tortoise, the snake, the elephant, the peacock
and the Mexican leader in The Plumed Serpent.

One may object to the ‘abdominal within,’ but, never-
theless, the fact remains that things do have insides,
and that the more we know about the collective un-
conscious, the more probable it seems that the outer
shell which mostly differentiates and individualizes life
exhibits secondary, acquired characteristics, and that the
primary characteristics belong to the unconscious, and are
therefore collective. Lawrence was only an individualist
in the sense that he wished the individual to be free in
order that he might transcend his own separation from

178 THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

his fellow-beings, and fulfil his deep and unconscious
being through sex, and through non-individual, primary
sensations.

All through his life Lawrence was preoccupied with ideas
of death. But death in most of his work is an experience
affecting individuals : it is the death of the mother in Sons
and Lovers, and again of his own mother in the poems.
In these books it lacks the quality of an objective sensa-
tion completely drowning the individual, in the sense
that sex has that quality. Sex is, indeed, in his novels, a
river in which his characters bathe and renew themselves,
but at the same time a terrible river, which they fear.
Sex to Lawrence, the mysterious ‘dark’ world, at which
Wyndham Lewis so shudders, is life, it is the very opposite
of death, it has ecstasies which are ‘beyond life and death,’
and it is the means of escape for the individual from the
living death of the modern world. He is nowhere more
emphatic than in his condemnation of Whitman :

‘A certain ghoulish insistency. A certain horrible pottage
of human parts. A certain stridency and portentousness.
A luridness about his beatitudes.’^ Yet one is puzzled, be-
cause it reads remarkably like an account of his own work.
He condemns Whitman because of his all-embracing
attitude to the world, because of his lack of privacy,
because of his everlasting journey along an open road.
Yet who had less privacy than Lawrence, all of whose
novels are autobiographical, and all his affairs discussed
by his former friends Who travelled further in search of
life and comradeship.? And where is individuality more
deeply submerged than in his world of sensations.?

He points out that Walt Whitman found himself most
completely— and paradoxically— in his poems about death.
He quotes a poem, and comments:

1 Studies in Classical American Literature; Walt Whitman, p. 162.

NOTES ON D. H. LAWRENCE

179

‘This is strange, from the exultant Walt.

‘Death!

‘Death is now his chant! Death!

‘Merging! And Death! Which is the final merge.

‘The great merge into the womb. Woman.

‘And after that, the merge of comrades: man-for-man
love.

‘And almost immediately with this, death, the final
merge of death.

‘There you have the progression of merging. For the
great mergers, woman at last becomes inadequate. For
those who love to extremes.’^

Here again we are brought face to face with Lawrence
himself. The last paragraph might almost be his own
epitaph. The experience or experiment of man for man
love is recorded in Aaron's Rod^ and again in Women in
Love. Before this, in the earlier poems, you get ‘the
great merge into the womb. Woman.’ Especially in
the poems about his mother.

What are we to conclude from this }

It is, perhaps, that if one attempts the merging of the
individuality into the collective unconscious in sex, one
must finally accept it also in death.

And Lawrence did this. In his Last Poems he accepted
his Ship of Death, as willingly as Whitman had followed
his open road to death before him.

‘Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay.

Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:

O, that the earth which kept the world in awe
Should patch a wall t’expel the winter’s flaw!’

* Studies in Classic American Literature (p. 168).

i8o THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

This is also the ‘final merge’ which we find in Whitman.
But to-day the idea of physical dissolution does not
suggest death very strongly to us. It has to be particularly
violent (as in pictures of war corpses) even to horrify
us. Our death is loss of individuality. In a mechanized
age, an age of mass production, this kind of death haunts
life. Yet, as Lawrence very clearly saw, the assertion of
one’s individuality, the insistence on one’s will is not
the answer of life to this modern form of death. The
answer is, in fact, in a life that is deeper than individu-
ality; that has no assertive individuality that can be
taken away from it. In short, it is not death that
matters, but the reality of death. The deathly aspect
of our civilization is not a real death at all: it is an
unreality which makes life into a ghost. Real dying is
preferable to this.

The importance, then, of Lawrence as a revolutionary
and a preacher, is that he insisted on real and living
values: real life, real sexual experience, real death. All
ideas of love and honour could be sacrificed to these
realities. This is revolutionary, because it is clear that
if human beings insist on having lives with these values,
they cannot accept society as it now is.

I^awrence never felt that because he was an artist
his life was cut off from the lives of the people round
him. He did not even seem to feel the conflict in
himself, that so many artists complain of, between the
man and the artist. His written work was a by-
product of his whole creativeness, like sweating. He
did not feel the general creativeness in himself to be
freakish or abnormal. It was simply the creative urge of
life which ought to be present in everybody who was a
human being and not a machine. In some people it
would reveal itself in writing and painting : but it ought

NOTES ON D. H. LAWRENCE i8i

to unite in everyone to produce a kind of society which
was different and more creative than our own.

The fact that he was continually experimenting with
ideas for altering society is extremely significant. His
whole life was really such an experiment, with his plans
for establishing colonies in Mexico, his own travels,
and even, it seems, in his relationship with his wife. His
work is all a documentation of his attempts to discover
a new and better relationship between the sexes, and
new and better ways of living. But he himself is the
subject of the experiment, not his work. In his writing
he is not technically an innovator.

Lawrence’s books are the extreme opposite of the type
of book represented by James Joyce’s Ulysses. Such art
as Ulysses is an extreme form of romantic idealism.
There is no doubt of its greatness as poetic achievement;
but it is important to realize that Ulysses is at the end
of the tradition which produced it. The art of Joyce
is really independent of any social structure : it depends
simply on the mental experience of the individual
writer.

The danger with writers who are strongly individualistic
is that they are creating a culture which depends only on
a personal experience and personal beliefs; which has
no roots in the life around it; which is not the fruit of
beliefs held by many people; which is blas6, and not even
rebellious. Therefore society may wake up at any moment
and find that it can do without the individual creators
of this art, because the art is the possession of certain
people, and not the life-blood of the civilization; this has
happened to the majority of the artists in Germany.

In opposition to most of the writers of his time,
Lawrence was an artist on the side of the whole civiliza-
tion, not just the supporter of a clique. Firstly, he recog-

i 82 three individualists

nized the existence of external nature having a vivid
life of its own, independent of the life of man. Secondly,
his own life was deeply rooted in physical and social
experiences shared by the people round him. Thirdly,
he was deeply interested in what we may in the widest
sense call political and moral questions. Fourthly, he
was not a reactionary: he was a creative writer, not merely
in the aesthetic sense, but in the sense that his writing
was a constant search for a new life and a new form of
life in which civilization might survive or be re-created.

He did not sacrifice his life to his art, or even, as has
been suggested, his art to his life. The two functions are
in his work, well balanced. Yet he is not in the least a
perfect artist, and his writing has many faults; particularly,
I think that until the end of his life he never seems to
have had time to find the form best suited to his
expression. The point is, though, that it was scarcely
possible for him to discover that form : his life was bound
to be a search, and to be unsettled, full of conflict and in-
complete. Therefore, without falsity — not artistic falsity,
but falsity to the life in his work— he could not write
conclusive and perfect novels. What he was really out
to write, no doubt, were books that had the weight and
translucency of parables or legends, full of moral signifi-
cance. A book like Moby Dick approximated to his ideal.
At the end of his life he wrote The Man Who Died,
which has the strength of a legend, and which is artistically
better than the novels.

He was quite aware of his artistic weakness. He knew
that his work had to come out of the experience of his
life, and he knew that the conditions of his time would
soon make a great deal of that experience valueless.
Because it existed through a peculiar feat of tension and
balance it was bound also to die. ‘What a man has got

NOTES ON D. H. LAWRENCE 183

to say is never more than relatively important. To kill
yourself, like Keats, for what you’ve got to say, is to mix
the eggshell in with the omelette. That’s Keats’s poems
to me. The very excess of beauty is the eggshell between
one’s teeth. . . .’

‘. . . I don’t take myself seriously, except between
8 and 10 a.m., and at the stroke of midnight. At other
seasons, my say, like any butterfly, may settle where it
likes : on the lily of the field or the horsetod in the road :
or nowhere. It has departed from me.’

There are two ways of regarding Lawrence. The first
is, qualitatively, as I have done here, regarding especially
the descriptive passages in his novels, and the Nature
poems in Birds, Beasts and Flowers. The other and
more disappointing way is to consider him primarily as
a preacher. For although his ‘message,’ if one may call
it that, is very important, and although his attitude to
sex and idealized Love is passionate and revealing, his
creed is unfortunately confused by his poetic gift of
multiple personality. Wherever he travelled he seems to
have had a gift of entering completely into the existence
of the people around him. What is unfortunate is that
instead of being content with this poetic gift, he seems
to have wished to exploit it on behalf of himself and
others in order to make himself into some other person.
He is most notorious, I suppose, for his admiration of
Mexican Indians, because of his attempts in The Plumed
Serpent, particularly, to adopt their beliefs. What no one
seems to have noticed is, though, that he was always
undergoing these transformations; and the transforma-
tions were nearly always fatal when they provided him,
as it were, with a skin in which he could more effectively
appear as a prophet than in his ownskin. An example
of simple transformation is in Lady Chatterley' s Lover

184 THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

where Lawrence becomes the gamekeeper, and the game-
keeper talks the gospel of Lawrence.

The result of all these transformations is that a rather
curious set of beliefs is linked up in Lawrence with various
modes of being. Things that he himself could not believe,
he managed to believe by turning into a horse, or a
Mexican, or the captain in The Captain's DoU^ or a miner,
or a gamekeeper. By these changes he managed to
despise in his books people who in life he did not par-
ticularly despise, and who seem, indeed, to have been his
friends, though for some reason he was rather ashamed
of some of his friends. He was also able immensely to
increase his own sexual potency, and to despise people
who didn’t happen to be horses or foxes, or whatever
virile animal he happened at the moment to be.

This process is rather similar to Yeats’s magic, and it
detracts from Lawrence’s greatness and even his serious-
ness as a contemporary writer. For one thing, it enabled
him to escape from his real subject, which was modern
civilization. His hatred for London seems to have
provided him with a motive for writing about London
without ever going there or knowing much about
it; writing from no motive except an impatience
which hardly even amounted to hatred. His hatred
for people who were not sexually very potent seems to
have developed finally into a kind of sadistic meanness.
The unfortunate Sir Clifford in Lady Chatterley's Lover is
pinpricked and tortured all through the book, and for no
other reason than that, through no fault of his own, he
is a cripple. One may suspect the motives of a writer who
imagines that he has some extraordinary grievance against
those who are physically weaker than himself, or than a
gamekeeper into whose skin he imagines himself. Lastly,
Lawrence, even more than James, was committed to the

NOTES ON D. H. LAWRENCE 185

‘special case.’ In spite of his working-class snobbery,
his characters are drawn very largely from the same
social class as the people in James’s novels. Lady Chatterley
is a James character, forty years on. Thus Lawrence’s
energy, instead of being directed to a real criticism of
society, is so strangely dispersed as to be liable to gross
misinterpretation. His theories, although they are loudly
and frequently expressed, are so emotional and personal
that they have even been seized on by the Nazis, who
hail Lawrence as the English writer whose theories are
most sympathetic to them.

In a letter to Edward Garnett,^ Lawrence made one
statement about his art which is of extreme import-
ance, and which will, perhaps, influence the future of
the novel, even more than it affected anything which
he himself wrote. I quote this in full:

‘Somehow, that which is psychic— non-human in
humanity is more interesting to me than the old-fashioned
human element, which causes one to conceive a character
in a certain moral scheme and make him consistent. The
certain moral scheme is what I object to. In Turgenev,
and in Tolstoy, and in Dostoievsky, the moral scheme
into which all the characters fit — and it is nearly the same
scheme — is, whatever the extraordinariness of the char-
acters themselves, dull, old, dead. When Marinetti
writes : “ It is the solidity of a blade of steel that is interesting
by itself, that is, the incomprehending and inhuman
alliance of its molecules in resistance to, let us say, a
bullet. The heat of a piece of wood or iron is, in fact,
more passionate, for us, than the laughter or tears of a
woman”— then I know what he means. He is stupid, as
an artist, for contrasting the heat of the iron and the

^ Mr. Aldous Huxley draws attention to this passage in his Introduc-
tion to the Letters, which is the best essay on Lawrence.

i86 THREE INDIVIDUALISTS

laugh of the woman. Because what is interesting in the
laugh of the woman is the same as the binding of the
molecules of steel or their action in heat : it is the inhuman
will, call it physiology, or like Marinetti, physiology of
matter, that fascinates me. I don’t so much care about
what the woman feels — in the ordinary usage of the word.
That presumes an ego to feel with. I only care about
what the woman is — what she IS — inhumanly, physiologi-
cally, materially — according to the use of the word. . . .
You mustn’t look in my novel for the old stable ego of
the character. There is another ego, according to whose
action the individual is unrecognizable, and passes through,
as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense
than any we’ve been used to exercise, to discover are
states of the same single radically unchanged element.’

It is unfortunate that these words serve as an apology
for his characterization rather than as a manifesto. For
if he felt this, it is a pity he was not a writer of far greater
invention, and a pity that the characters in his novels
were often merely portraits of his friends. Nevertheless,
this passage explains the way in which a new attitude to
character is possible to modern writers, and because it
rejects the naturalistic novel, it points to new forms,
perhaps to the poetic drama.

PART III

IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

X

HENRY JAMES

AND THE CONTEMPORARY SUBJECT

The question for a writer of our time, which is at the
back of all the discussed questions of belief, and of con-
temporary sensibility, is what is the modern subject?
A subject large enough to enable the poet to write long
poems, to make possible a dramatic poetry. To free the
novel from mere rapportage or case history, and yet to
relate it to the political life, the morality and manners
of the time.

To say that The W asle Land ‘effects a complete sever-
ance between poetry and belief’ is in itself almost meaning-
less: what is more explicit is, I think, to say that The
Waste Land is an example of a long poem without any
subject, or in so far as there is any subject, it is the
conscious lack of belief, to which I. A. Richards
has drawn attention. What we are offered instead of
a subject is a pattern of diverse impressions: instead
of any statement about life or the universe having been
made, a kind of historic order has been achieved when
the author says, ‘These fragments I have shored against
my ruins.’ We are aware of his sense of our unenviable
position in the history of our civilization, and of a vast
background.

What a writer writes about is related to what he believes.
What he writes about also implies an attitude to the time
in which he is living. It is here that I. A. Richards’s
doctrine of ‘severance’ comes in. For if there is conflict

189

190 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

between the belief of the man and the belief of the time in
which he is living, the belief that should be positive in the
man is turned negative, in its reaction to his contempor-
aries. In such a situation, there are various courses open to
a writer. He may escape entirely from his surroundings;
into the past, into the country. The poetry of Walter de
la Mare is to-day an example at its most interesting of
that kind of an escape into an unreal world: some of
the poetry of W. H. Davies an example of escape at its
most facile. The writer may, on the other hand, try and
justify his own position by ‘shoring up his fragments,’
and postulating an entire world of unbelief around him.
This is what produces the appearance of a ‘severance
between poetry and belief.’ But, of course, the writer of
The Waste Land himself believes. He believes in the
part of London where

‘the walls

‘Of Magnus Martyr hold

Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.’

What he is chiefly implying, though, is that in other, dead
generations, there was a tradition of belief to which he
could doubtless have conformed. What he is now im-
plying is that he is living in a time of disbelief. What he
is doubting is the efficacy and the value of his own
private beliefs.

When I speak of writers who have beliefs, I am now
discussing writers whose subjects are moral, or, in the
widest sense, political, and I am not thinking of ‘pure’
artists. I have chosen the writers in this book, because
they are political-moral artists who are in the dilemma of
Hamlet; they find their lives fixed in a world in which
there are no external symbols for their inner sense of
values. There is no power, and no glory. They are,

HENRY JAMES 191

therefore, forced either to satirize the world by showing
it up as it really is (you may call such satire amoral, if you
like, but to do so, as I hope to show, is a confusion) or
they are obliged to try and reconcile the world with them-
selves, by adopting a hopeful evangelizing tone, or they
are obliged to invent a set of symbols of their own,
and, in the eyes of the world, like Hamlet, to feign
madness; or they may retreat into the realms of pure art.
The generation of Henry James, in a tradition carried
on through Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound,
produced a whole series of long (in some cases ‘unfinished
symphonies’), excellent and unreadable masterpieces, full
of moral feeling, but a moral feeling that is not satis-
factorily illustrated by the subject.

I now turn again to James, because one sees in his
writing, as on a very large-scale map, the course of a great
deal of modern literature.

Most criticism of James boils down to saying that he
is unreadable. This is a very reasonable complaint, and
one that a critic should certainly discuss. But I have
tried to show that his unreadability has been attributed
to the wrong causes — to his snobbishness, his prudery,
and the difficulties of his style.

His method of presentation is, indeed, a sufficient
reason for his not becoming a popular classic, in the
Dickensian sense; but so far is it from being the real
error that makes the neglect of him in a sense justified,
it is his greatest contribution to the novel as a form.

What James did in fact revolutionize is the manner
of presenting the scene in the novel: and the relation of
the described scene to the emotional development of the
characters. The novel has, of course, in the presentation
of the passions, never broken quite away from the tradition
of the theatre: in Balzac, in Flaubert, in Tolstoy, in

192 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

Dickens, in Thackeray, the reflective and descriptive
and philosophic parts of the books are all threads con-
necting us with certain dramatic scenes, which are,
in particular, of the greatest emotional importance. In
the description, we see the alignment of characters; in the
scenes we witness the release of emotions, the expression
of passion.

In Joyce, in Proust, in James, this process is reversed.
The scene, with accompanying dialogue and action, is
used mainly as a means of aligning the characters: ex-
plaining what are the reactions of each to the other, what
each reflects, and bringing characters together. The
descriptive parts of the book, which are mainly mono-
logues, are used to reveal the growth of passionate feelings,
of love, of hatred. There are, of course, scenes which
are highly dramatic, but the emphasis of these is not
revelatory: they are the climax of what has already been
revealed. When Fanny Assingham smashes the golden
bowl, we know exactly what she and Maggie think of
the bowl as a symbol of all the passionate feelings which
are associated with it. The scene is a symptom of passions
which quite overshadow it, and which we have for long
been observing: it does not create passions; it does not
introduce a new emotional turn of situation; there is no
use made of such external, introduced elements as Anna
Karenina’s scene with her husband, when he is ill, which
suddenly, as it were, ‘arrives,’ to make her relationship
with Vronsky seem superficial. The scene does, in a
word, end a phase, rather than begin a new one : it is like
a nervous breakdown which we have so long watched
developing, that the symptoms, when they actually
emerge, are a relief from protracted neurosis.

The advantage of the Jamesian method is that the
drama has organic growth, and is able to proceed unaided

HENRY JAMES 193

by the introduction of new, accidental material from a
world developing outside and independently of the world
created in the novel. The danger of this method is to
make the novel too self-sufficient, and, while it belongs
to a ‘realistic* tradition (it purports to describe ‘real’
characters and real ‘events’: and it is not stylized), to
ignore what is generally recognized as reality.

Nevertheless, James’s approach is not untrue to life:
it is not even less ‘realistic’ than that of the novel based
on a dramatic tradition. For the grand sc^ne passionnelle
is a symptom, but not the root of passion. Passionate
activity is intellectual activity. His realization of this is
James’s great contribution to the novel. The effect of
passion is not a momentary display, but a stimulus to
thought, which is at once dazzling and intricate. For
example, if I am angry about something, the scene in
which I display my anger is only a symptom, or at
best a cure, of anger. My anger is a continual train of
thought expressing itself in many visions, sounds and
colours.

I have tried, therefore, to show not only that
James’s artistic method was justified, but also that his
account of our society makes, in effect, an indictment as
fierce as that of Baudelaire : or, indeed, of a class-conscious
Marxist writer. Therefore, if I am still faced with the
problem of his unreadability, of some obstacle that pre-
vents his interest in life ever meeting that of the general
reader, it seems possible that the cause of this difficulty
is something much more fundamental than has been
expected.

The real difficulty in Henry James lies in his inescapable
individualism. He never found in life a subject that
completely dragged him out of himself. It will be remem-
bered that at the opening of The Golden Bowl Maggie

194 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

Verver and her father are continually faced with their own
selfishness. Their problem is, as I have said, to invent some
new marriage, by which they can divorce themselves from
their own inner world of a marriage between father and
daughter, and create a new synthesis, a marriage of the
inner with the external world. That was James’s own
problem. The most objective of writers, his values are
yet entirely personal, in the sense that they are wholly
acceptable only to a person whose isolation of experience
is identified with his own. For example, his attitude to
love is not, as has been said, that of a prude, nor yet that
of a lover, certainly not of a Donne! It is that of a person
who, profoundly with his whole being, after overcoming
great inhibition, has accepted the idea of people loving.
No description of people loving is more moving than his
account of Charlotte and Amerigo falling, as it were, into
each other’s arms. The situation, where the husband of
the daughter vows with the wife of the father that they
will always protect the father and daughter— and then
they break down— has the stain of evil in it which one
finds in the Elizabethans. It might be the Duchess of
Malfi claiming Antonio. But this is how James describes
it, in a passage which I have already quoted:

‘ “It’s sacred,’’ she breathed back to him. They vowed
it, gave it out and took it in, drawn, by their intensity,
more closely together. Then of a sudden, through this
tightened circle, as at the issue of a narrow strait into
the sea beyond, everything broke up, broke down, gave
way and mingled. Their lips sought their lips, their
pressure their response and their response their pressure;
with a violence that had sighed itself the next moment
to the longest and deepest of stillnesses they sealed their
pledge.’

Here is Webster:

195

HENRY JAMES

‘duch.: . . . Go, go brag

You have left me heartless; mine is in your
bosom :

I hope ’twill multiply love there. You do
tremble :

Make not your heart so dead a piece of flesh.

To fear more than to love me. Sir, be confident:
What is’t distracts you? This is flesh and blood,
sir;

’Tis not the figure cut in alabaster
Kneels at my husband’s tomb. Awake, awake,
man!

I do here put off all vain ceremony.

And only do appear to you a young widow
That claims you for her husband, and, like a
widow,

I use but half a blush in’t.

ANT.: Truth speak for me;

I will remain the constant sanctuary
Of your good name.

DUCH.: I thank you, gentle love:

And ’cause you shall not come to me in debt.
Being now my steward, here upon your lips
I sign your Quietus est. This you should have
begged now:

I have seen children oft eat sweetmeats thus.

As fearful to devour them too soon.’

Comparing these two passages, one sees in a striking
way the effect of Puritan culture, in the repressed and
yet desperately courageous imagery of James.

James, after a lifetime of deep human understanding,
has arrived at a stage where in suffering and pity he
could accept the fact of physical love. The incident that to

196 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

most people would seem most simple, most common,
and yet most peculiar and isolated, is to him universalized
as part of the whole cosmos. He cannot make lovers kiss
without seeming to cry out, ‘I accept this with pity and
understanding, just as I accept with my mind everything
that is life — and hence the proper subject for Art.’ So
the lips that meet are not Charlotte’s and the prince’s,
they are the lips of all lovers; and yet they are no lips and
no lovers, they are the symbols of James’s spiritual
acceptance. Whereas Webster in his great play is suddenly
able to clinch the reality and the isolation of his lovers
by making them speak poetry in the language of prose
(he knows that, given their moment of ecstasy, their
language cannot fail to be poetry, so the less poetic it
is, the better), James is borne away on a flood of poetry
which almost drowns his lovers.

His approach to love, his approach to life, his approach
to the obvious, is by way of a North-West Passage. The
reader never escapes for a moment from the long journey
James has made, and on which he is required to accompany
him. He cannot watch someone sign a cheque, or give
a kiss, or hail a four-wheeler, without being drowned by
waves, or smothered in flowers of James’s peculiar mental
voyage.

The fact is, that whilst the subject of James’s book is
his morality, and the working out of that morality of love
and intelligence in his characters, this morality is fogged
and confused by the fact that a very great deal of his work
is about nothing except that he is a New Englander who
has spent his life trying to reconcile a puritan New Eng-
land code of morals with his idea of the European tra-
dition. This obstructive element is so obvious in his work
that he himself was unconscious of it and tried to exploit
it by a number of devices. What I wish especially to be

HENRY JAMES 197

noticed is that it affected his actual choice of subjects:
on that account he devised the ‘International Situation,’
as he called it, and sent his Americans to Europe, and his
Europeans to America. So that what he actually wrote
about was decided by a peculiarity of his situation, which
it is absurd to expect his reader to share : all his reader can
do is imaginatively to enter into it. The privilege the
reader is offered is to become Henry James, a highly
sensitive, cultured man, with extremely isolated spiritual
experiences. Of course, as I have tried to show, there is
much more to James than that; but it is this extreme
individualism of James in his whole attitude to experience
that makes him difficult to read. When one reads James,
one is, the whole time, unconsciously compelled to
identify one’s situation in the universe with his own.
One has to accept what one might call the secondary
political consequences of his ethic : the necessity of having
a large income in order to lead a morally significant life;
rules of conduct which make the whole style of con-
versation become based on gossip and tittle-tattle, and
which yet prevent people from saying the important
things even about their relationships with one another.
All these superficialities, which so irritate readers of
James, are really part of the ritual of his belief in in-
dividualism.

I have tried to show how these whims of James’s are
really linked up with very important convictions which
often fundamentally contradict all that lies on the surface.
But when we are dealing with a private creed, we need not
be surprised if we find contradictions and obscurities . , .
there are enough contradictions in our public beliefs. No
one is in the least surprised when an ex-Major, who
regards war as the embrace of a lover, writes, ‘The war gave
more life, not less. Yes, life, in spite of all the lives we

igS IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

lost. I feel it, as I stand in the loveliest of all the gardens
of our unforgotten dead, looking down on the still waters
of the moat at Ypres.’ Followed by, ‘But another war?
not that! The idea brings with it a feeling of horror and
despair.’^ James was living in a society whose life is made
tolerable by accepting, with an air of joyful mystery, such
fundamental contradictions. His own attitude to the war
was almost as ambiguous.

James repeatedly insisted, in all sincerity, that he had
no political opinion. But actually his writings are full of
negative opinion, expressed in his admiration of a system
that keeps the kind of society, which he writes about,
alive. The contradiction in James is the contradiction
that has affected the writing of most writers of the late
nineteenth, and of this century. On the one hand, he is
a rebel against the political and economic corruption of
his time: he appears as the champion of art against the
philistinism of parliamentary ambition. On the other
hand, because he is an individualist, because he has
worked out in his books his own private system of
ethics, which makes it possible for the individual to live
aesthetically and morally, in spite of the world around him,
he becomes finally a snob, and a supporter of the system,
which still makes this existence possible in spite of circum-
stances. To say this is not to say that he lost his integrity:
it is, rather, to say that he found it. He saw through the
political and social life of his time, but he cherished the
privilege which enabled him to see through it.

The life which James wrote about is now as dead as
mutton, and in a sense it never was alive. The morality,
which is the true subject his novels illustrate, requires
for his purpose an ordered society, an aristocracy, and
statesman-like figures commanding positions of power.

^ F. Yeats-Brown, The Dogs of tFar.

HENRY JAMES 199

Remaining true to the realistic tradition of the European
novel, he described an Anglo-Saxon society, but exercised
all his remarkable power of fantasy (perhaps fantasy is his
most peculiar gift) in creating a grand worldly scene in
which the wealth of upstarts is as expressive as the wealth
of a Renaissance prince. In his novels the royalties and
aristocrats are so surrounded by an atmosphere of snobbery,
that the snobbery creates an effect of anachronism: the
royalties are royal and the aristocrats are real. In fact,
James invented the position of his characters: or rather, by
a most ingenious turn of his art, he made his characters
invent themselves: for is not Maggie Verver inventing
herself all the while as ‘the princess’.? And James’s r6le
is simply never on any account to betray that she is
ridiculous in doing so.

James ought to have written about kings and queens:
but, of course, kings and queens are not available to the
modern artist, and are far too available to the newspapers :
so he therefore had to enhance unknown well-bred
scoundrels, like Amerigo, with a legend of social snobbery.
He ought to have written about popes, cardinals, and
politicians who exert a great deal of worldly power; but
to-day there are no holders of power that is a recognized
and established value, in the sense that Richelieu had
power; the power-mongers keep well behind the scenes:
he therefore had to write about monsters who have
accumulated mountains of corrupt wealth. Nice monsters,
like Mr. Verver, or very bad monsters, like the two old
men in The Ivory Tower. Lastly, he should have been
free to write about lovers; but unfortunately in the world
he was describing there was no element of innocence.
The only way in which he could free his lovers from the
disgrace of ‘money-making’ was to make them heirs,
and to make them heirs was to damn them, as we see

200 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

both in The Wings oj the Dove and, more savagely, in
The Ivory Tower.

James tried, of course, to write political novels, but
the political subject tended to political satire, in The
Princess Casamassima and The Tragic Muse. In order to
express moral values he had to invent human values.

In the same way as James is a political-moral artist
without a realistic subject drawn from contemporary life
to correspond with his ultimate, ethical subject, so Joyce
seems to me a religious artist. After his gigantic effort
to impose epic values on the modern world, accepted
even at its most sordid, he had been compelled not only
to invent subjective symbols, but to invent a new language.
The same kind of subjectivism, though in an elaborately
disguised form, exists in Wyndham Lewis’s most am-
bitious novel. The Apes oj God.

The key to the subjectivism of all these writers is an
intense dissatisfaction with modern political institutions.

XI

THE GREAT WITHOUT

When I speak of the subject of literary art, I mean some-
thing distinct from theme, plot or description, yet essen-
tially related to these. The subject of Paradise Lost is
the fall of man. But it is much more than this: in contrast
to the negative subject of the fall, a great many positive
assertions are made, about the order of heaven and
earth, and the nature of man. In Paradise Lost the
subject is a complex of beliefs which the writer is
able to share with the reader, and which the reader can
accept without straining his credulity. That is to say,
the belief is compatible with beliefs that were generally
shared by many of Milton’s contemporaries.

The position of these accepted beliefs, shared between
the author and the reader, is exactly that of nature in
nature poetry. The writer and reader are able to meet
on the common ground of an agreed subject: the slopes
of a mountain, or the existence of God. Most writers
make constant use of the accepted beliefs of their time.
Shakespeare makes constant use of the conception of
power — of kingship — which is the main subject of
Elizabethan literature. It is interesting to observe that,
as the idea of a central source of power disintegrates,
the symbol of power also disperses and is split into
many symbols. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Shakespeare’s
Mark Antony, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Lear, all
become dissolved into the cardinals, dukes, princes,
duchesses and mothers-in-law of Webster; many

201

202 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

symbols of a unifying power that has become split up
into divisions.

To take more recent examples, the works of Wells,
Bennett, and Shaw, all have as their central subject the
most generally accepted of modern beliefs, the idea of pro-
gress. It can hardly be disputed that many people to-day
believe in scientific progress as the one certain objective
reality existing outside themselves, and as independent
in its extent and performance as God. However dis-
appointing man is, there is no doubt that machines
improve, and that the failure of individuals is contrasted
wi^, if not balanced by, immense progress in the objec-
tive, mechanistic world. Both Shaw and Wells have
made themselves and their works widely acceptable by
exploiting this idea, and pointing out that humanity
after all acts on the same mechanistic principles as its
tools. Shaw talks about the Life Force, and Wells boldly
declares on the first page of his Science of Life that ‘the
body is a machine.’ He also flatters the human brain
by pointing out that it is almost as complicated as a
telephone exchange.

The writers whom I have been discussing have not
found a subject in any belief that is generally held to-
day. The beliefs one finds as part of the general legend
created by Yeats’s lyrical poetry are recognized rather
than generally consented to. People are snobbish about
royalty, and yet find Eliot slightly comic in calling
himself a royalist, and feel that the qualities which Mr.
Yeats prays for in the Prayer for My Daughter., are
anachronistic. They go on making money, accumulating
possessions to hand on to their children, when really they
believe that they will almost certainly lose their money in
the not remote future. In this way behaviour lags behind
the immediate processes of life, which are concerned with

THE GREAT WITHOUT

203

what people really believe, and which are the subject
of poetry. Poetry is sensitive to new forms of life, long
before they have influenced behaviour.

So these writers whom I have been discussing have
either reacted from the heresy of Progress, which is the
only generally held belief to-day, to the recognized
strongholds of religion and aristocratic individualism, or
they have attempted to write about life cut off from belief
altogether.

Pleasure or sorrow in the incidents of life, cut oflF from
all theorizing or opinion, are the source of lyricism.
The lyrical impulse is the impulse simply to sing the joy
or sorrow of life; the inspiration is the diversity of appear-
ances, and the sense perhaps of a unity behind them.
Therefore it is not surprising that few successful long
poems have been written to-day; and that the form of
the most successful long poems should be an extension
of the lyric, and should owe a great deal to musical forms,
such as the symphony and the sonata. On the other hand,
it is also not surprising that the writers who have made
the most successful alliance with progress should have
no difficulty in writing long works. The Old Wives’ Tale.,
Back to Methuselah, The World of William Clissold.
Whereas the form of Ulysses, Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Work
in Progress, has only been achieved with stupendous
difficulty. On an altogether smaller scale, Virginia Woolf’s
most successful novels. The Waves and To the Lighthouse,
are purely lyrical in their inspiration. It is worth remark-
ing, too, that Yeats is most actual and most powerful
in his purely lyrical poems, in which he is referring to
no background of belief. When he writes a longer poem,
such as The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid (1923), he has to
draw on the magical resources of the early poems.

So there are — to put it crudely — three main attitudes

204 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

dividing contemporary writers, (i) There is the attitude
of the writer who consciously expresses no belief. He
or she may be a writer of the kind outlined by I. A.
Richards in his account of the Eliot of The Waste Land.
Or he may be a purely lyrical writer, like Yeats in his
shorter poems, or Virginia Woolf in her later novels.
(2) There is the attitude of the writer who expresses
a private individualistic belief: this book has until
now been an account of such writers. (3) There is the
writer who interprets an existing belief or foretells a
future belief. The two leading beliefs of our time —
leading ladies — are Progress and Success: amply inter-
preted by the majority of writers, excellent, good and
indifferent, from Shaw, Wells and Priestley, through
Noel Coward and Beverley Nichols downwards. The
writers who foretell a future belief are chiefly the com-
munist writers, but to some extent, I think, also the
psychologists: I shall discuss them in a later chapter.

Here I am discussing only political-moral writers, not
lyricists; and I am primarily interested in writing which
is, after all, didactic in origin. I am trying to point out
that what a book is actually about is far more important
than most of my contemporaries seem to imagine: that
a writer equipped with a fine technique should ex-
perience the same kind of difficulty in finding a subject
as Beethoven had in finding a libretto for his opera. I
want also to show that there are things going on in the
world that are worth writing about; and I think that the
predominance of autobiographical themes, particularly in
fiction, is a sign of the neglect of subject-matter, if not
of the decadence of style. I am not saying that writers
should write in any particular way or according to any-
one’s direction, but at times it seems that the political
movements of the time have a much greater moral sig-

THE GREAT WITHOUT

205

niiicance than the life of the individual, and, indeed, the
chief peculiarity of the individual is that his acts are
morally unrelated to the political movement : such a time
is the present, and my attempt in this book is to turn the
reader’s and writer’s attention outwards from himself to
the world.

Anyone who holds these views is in some ways
more indebted to Wyndham Lewis than to any other
writer. In two brilliant essays^ Lewis exposes the
methods of two American novelists, Ernest Hemingway
and William Faulkner. Both these writers are con-
cerned with the rather grandiose and often physically
courageous acts of heroes who take part in the war,
bull-fighting and hunting. But the essence of these
heroes or sub-heroes, which Lewis dubs the dumb oxen,
is that they are acted upon and that they do not act.
‘Hemingway’s books . . . scarcely contain a figure who
is not in some way futile, clown-like, passive, and, above
all, -purposeless. His world of men and women {in violent
action, certainly) is completely empty of will. His puppets
are leaves, very violently blown hither and thither; drugged
or at least deeply intoxicated phantoms of a sort of
matter-of-fact shell-shock.’

‘In A Farewell to Arms the hero is a young American
who has come over to Europe for the fun of the thing,
as an alternative to baseball, to take part in the Sport of
Kings. It has not occurred to him that it is no longer the
Sport of Kings, but the turning-point in the history of
the earth at which he is assisting. . . .’*

This analysis is excellent and important, for it extends
to a whole school of modern literature, far wider than
Hemingway and Faulkner. In fact, what Lewis is attack-

^ Wyndham Lewis, Men tvithout Art,

^ pp. 21 and 22.

2o6 in defence of A POLITICAL SUBJECT

ing, in this prose, as vehemently italicised as Queen
Victoria’s correspondence, is the type of modern fiction.
Where Lewis seems to me wrong, is in imagining that
the subject-matter of a writer is identical with his moral
subject. To Lewis, it is sufficient praise or dispraise of
a book to report its factual content, without making any
allowance for the attitude of the author, or the state of
society which he is describing; nevertheless, he makes
great allowance for the workmanship of books and the
quality of writing. Lewis tries to show that Hemingway
is almost identical with his hero (the ‘I’ of A Farewell
to Arms has many of Hemingway’s exploits to his credit),
and therefore that Hemingway’s attitude to the universe
is identical with that of his hero. This may be true,
and, if so, it certainly is damaging to any defence of
the autobiographical novel; but the Lewis method is
less satisfying when it is applied by Mario Praz in
a book called The Romantic Agony., extending to several
hundred pages, to literature since the nineteenth century.
Professor Praz summarizes the plots and matter of
some hundreds of romantic and post-romantic poems
and fictions, and exposes their decadent nature, the
predominance of themes of perversion and diabolism.
This is salubrious, but not entirely explicit, because unless
one considers very carefully the attitude of each writer
in turn (which Professor Praz does not do) it is not clear
whether his exposure is of a literature, or a civilization,
or both. Lewis is an admirer of Professor Praz, and
indeed considers him as his disciple (‘this gigantic pile
of Satanic bric-a-brac, so industriously assembled, under
my directions, cf. The Diabolic Principle, etc.’), but when
he all too mildly wonders why his follower has not
brought his inquiry further up-to-date, perhaps he forgets
how embarrassing would be the results of this simplified

THE GREAT WITHOUT

207

potting when applied to The Apes of God or Snooty
Baronet. The Apes of God^ Lewis’s satire, abounds with
descriptions of flagellants, homosexuality and diflPused
effeminacy. But Lewis has a reply (for which, though,
Praz does not allow), that the method of The Apes of
God is satiric and external : the Apes are regarded from
the outside, and the writer and reader are spectators who
have not ‘sucked in the stale and sickly airs which have
been hanging over Europe for a century.’

So that Lewis defends satire, and claims that in
so doing he is defending Art. ‘To “Satire” I have given
a meaning so wide as to confound it with “Art.” . . .
For all practical purposes, then, we may describe this
book as a defence of contemporary art, most of which
art is unquestionably satiric, or comic. This is, of course,
to introduce an entirely new issue into Praz’s revelations ;
because Lewis is implying that the writers who have
absorbed this post - romantic subject-matter are not
artists, unless they are satirists : and the number of satirists
is very few; Lewis is hard put to it to find anyone but
himself.

Lewis is involved also in ignoring the different moral
attitudes of the writers whom he is attacking, for the
reason that ‘the greatest satire is non-moral.’^

‘There is, of course, no question that satire of the
highest order has been achieved in the name of the
ethical will. Most satire, indeed, has got through upon
the understanding that the satirist first and foremost was
a moralist. And some of the best satirists have been
that as well. But not all. . . .’®

‘It could perhaps be asserted, even, that the greatest
satire cannot be moralistic at all: if for no other reason,

* Men without Art, p. 10. * Ibid., chapter heading, p. 103.

® Ibid., p. 107.

2o8 in defence of A POLITICAL SUBJECT

because no mind of the first order, expressing itself in
art, has ever itself been taken in, or consented to take in
others, by the crude injunctions of any purely moral
code.’^

, It is my belief that “satire” for its own sake —
as much as anything else for its own sake— is possible:
and that even the most virtuous and well-proportioned of
men is only a shadow, after all, of some perfection; a
shadow of an imperfect, and hence an “ugly,” sort.’®

This seems quite plausible as a defence of a kind
satiric realism. But Lewis has now to explain what
are the fitting objects of satire. So we are ‘■old that
to-day art should be essentially a massacre not of the
innocents, but of the insignificants. He goes on (quite
rightly) to defend satirists for attacking unimportant but
pretentious individuals, rather than the great. However,
he is still in difficulties, because he seems aware that,
by leaving out the moral element, he has simply con-
structed a satirist who is a sort of automaton. A satirist
who attacks everyone (except the really significant), but
who has no particular reason (except prejudice.?) for
attacking one set of people rather than another. We are
now told that satire in itself is good (pp. 1 21-125). This,
though, is a return to the moralist thesis, so there follows
a chapter called ‘Is Satire Real?’ in which we are told,
‘The sort of question we shall have to ask ourselves will
rather be Is Satire Real? than Is Satire Good?'

Confusing as all this is, Lewis makes his points with
great force, and his argument is illustrated with observa-
tions that are often brilliant. The tendency in literature
from which he reacts is that of producing ‘a tumultuous
stream of evocative, spell-bearing vocables, launched at
your head — or poured into your Unconscious. ... It
® Men without Art, p. 108 * Ibid., p. 109.

THE GREAT WITHOUT 209

may be an auriferous mud, but it must remain mud— not
a clear but a murky picture. As a literary medium it is
barbaric.’^

Except when Lewis shows traces of a personal ani-
mosity, as he often does in his attacks on D. H. Lawrence,
Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, the main effect of his
enemy attack is extremely tonic. But his book contains two
confusions to which it is very important to draw attention.

The first confusion is that Lewis seems to believe that
the romantic-decadent failing of the internal in Joyce
and his followers can be corrected simply by a writer
studiously describing the outside of things. ‘The external
approach to things belongs to the “classical” manner of
apprehending.’ ‘The external approach to things (relying
upon the evidence of the eye rather than of the more
emotional organs of sense) can make of “the grotesque”
a healthy and attractive companion.’ ‘Dogmatically, then,
I am for the Great Without, for the method of external
approach— for the wisdom of the eye rather than that of
the ear.’ ^ Obviously something is going wrong when we
are asked to assume that classicism (including all the
greatest poetry of the world) ignores the wisdom of the
ear (it is questionable whether even classical architecture
does not appeal to an imagery which is partly metrical
and aural). The confusion becomes still more evident
when Lewis goes on to say, ‘To put this in a nutshell, it
is the shell of the animal that the plastically-minded artist
will prefer. The ossature is my favourite part of a living
organism, not its intestines.’ ® But the ossature is just as
much inside an animal as the intestine; and the intestine
of a human being is also just as much on the surface
and affects the shell, as does the backbone. Moreover,
in an age when abdominal operations are so common,

^ Men without Art, p. 127. * Ibid., p. 123. ® Ibid., p. 120.

210 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

it is impossible for most people not to realize that the
intestines can be made visible and all too apparently
part of the Great Without, just as much as are the
bones. Lewis has in fact transferred his objection to the
‘Unconscious’ to the intestines. It is reasonable to
suspect, therefore, that he is trying to rationalize an
objection to the morally decadent subjects of a type of
literature, in order to make his objection fit in with the
theory of the eye and the Great Without. In a word,
Lewis is trying to discover a simple formula which will
completely externalize his own writing and make it
independent of the ‘interior’ school of fiction. His whole
argument is over-simplified: it is like saying that a man
who has pulmonary tuberculosis can get well by pretend-
ing that he has no lungs ; only the outside of his body is
real.

The second and more important confusion arises from
the same simplification. The argument seems to be that
because the external is the classic, and the internal is
decadent, therefore the subject of a book must be as
external as possible. The writer must be a satirist, and he
must be non-moral in his satire; because if the satirist
starts being a moralist, then the internal creeps in again.
Lewis seems to insist, in fact, that the subject of a book
should be, as simply as possible, what is described. There-
fore he emphasizes the importance of action and the
importance of the will. Why, though, without any moral
motive, should the satirist want to make humanity ridicu-
lous.? Lewis answers, in effect, that the satiric mind is
lyrical, in the sense in which I have described the lyric as an
amoral comment on the nature of life. ‘It is difficult to see
how the objective truth of much that is called “Satire” can
be less true than the truth of the lyrical declamation,
in praise, for instance, of a lovely mistress. There is, in

THE GREAT WITHOUT 211

both cases, another truth, that is all. But both are upon
an equal intellectual footing, I think — only the humanly
‘agreeable’ is more often false than the humanly “dis-
agreeable.” That is unavoidable, seeing what we are.’^

This analogy is false, because of all forms the love-lyric
may become the least concerned with the mere external
shell, and is the most apt to become Visceral.’ Is it true that
classical literature in which there is the greatest amount
of action, the greatest amount of the Without, and every-
thing required by Wyndham Lewis, is unmoral ? The
morality of The Odyssey is certainly strange and cut off
from us, but just because it is so cut oflF, we realize
that Ulysses is a moral figure. If The Odyssey^ then, is
both external and moral, there can be no intrinsic con-
nexion between the external and the unmoral in literature.
The whole distinction is deceptive and false.

Is Lewis’s own satire unmoral.? The Apes of God is
a satire on a group of people who have pretensions as
artists. They are contrasted with a figure called Pierpoint,
who mysteriously hovers in the background, who re-
presents a seriousness and reality, in contrast to their
ape-like lives of mutual admiration and gesticulation.
Lewis, like Henry James, D. H. Lawrence and Ezra
Pound, has strong moral feelings about the position of
the artist in modern life. If one turns back from The
Apes of God to his criticism, one secs why this business
of the pseudo-artist contrasted with the real artist is a
subject of such moral importance.

'Thou shalt not steal — let us see how that is getting on.
All the great group of ethical safeguards that accompany
that central notion are to-day in the most intimate manner
in disarray. For, as everyone knows, “ individualism ” is
a far greater sin than stealing from an individual— irom
^ Men withont Art, p. 122.

212 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

your neighbour. ... If, for instance, to take a vivid
illustration, a woman writer were shown this manuscript
before I got it published, and supposing she took a
fancy to anything she saw there . . . and supposing she
took it into her head to steal it, lock, stock, and barrel!
What redress have I.? The Law Courts.? My dear sir,
those are places for richer men than I am. . . . The
judgement of the public would be this — “That was a smart
old girl who stole that fellow-author’s idea, that was!”
And, of course, a “brain-picker” is one of the most popular
of criminals, for “brains” are a rather rare and aristocratic
sort of “ possession.”

The Apes are satirized because they are thieves and
brain-pickers, and pseudo-artists. The subject of this
satire is moral indignation, even though Lewis may
have no moral axe to grind, and is no politician. But
actually this amorality is in itself a moral point of view,
because it is related to the old question that has cropped
up so often in these pages, of the position of the artist
in society. Lewis’s amorality and unpoliticism applies
only to the artist: it is not anarchy.

To say that the artist has no moral axe to grind is
not the same as to say that his art is amoral. This is a
false hypothesis. Very clear examples of the amoral
artist writing morally are to be found in the Elizabethans :
especially in the works of Webster and Tourneur. Our
best example is Tourneur’s play The Revenger's Tragedy,
for this is largely satire and meets Lewis on his own
ground. It presents a really savage picture of a society
in which there is no one who is not an adulterer, incestuous
and murderous. All that distinguishes the hero Vendice
from the other characters is that he has got their vices
on the brain; but we do not feel that this young man.
Men without Art, p. 219.

THE GREAT WITHOUT 213

who plots a ghastly murder of revenge because his mistress
has been destroyed by a duke, is morally superior to his
enemies. What we do realize is that his passion, although
it takes no moral form, is essentially a moral feeling, an
overwhelming vision of death and corruption : of himself
and even his dead mistress also as objects of corruption.
Vendice is not a moralizing figure: he is an artist pro-
strated with the moral vision of what the life around him
means.

So here we have satire which is moral, although the
writer is himself no moralist. It is a type of art which
Lewis has scarcely considered sufficiently. The point
is that the artist may, and to some extent must, be an
object of his own contemplation, even when he is looking
at other people. He cannot stand completely outside the
process of history in which he is involved, and outside
his own environment. The difficulty with The Apes of
God is precisely that the writer is not an object of his own
satire. One feels always that he is self-consciously put
above his creatures, and that the criticism which he
applies to them he throws at them (mud-slinging) and
therefore away from himself. In Gulliver's Travels one
never feels that Swift is watching and admonishing his
puppets; so they live. One always feels Lewis watching
his apes, forcing them to give themselves away and to
behave idiotically, so that in spite of the brilliant visual
trick of his descriptions, they become puppets. The
moment he abandons description his work becomes
cerebral: compare the chapter in The Apes of God called
Chez Lionel Klein^ Esq., with that called The Vir^n. The
Virgin is external, savage and brilliant, the other is full
of chatter like the talk of disembodied ghosts. It fails
in the same way as the gossip in The Awkward Age fails:
it defeats its own ends, by just presenting the kind of

214 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

silly gossip satirized; so that it remains no more important
or interesting than the original.

The fact is that by imposing an external order on
internal disorder, by ruggedly insisting on and accepting
only the outsides of things, one does not improve matters.
One merely shouts and grows angry with anyone who
has a point of view different from one’s own. For another
point of view is sure to seem visceral, internal, decadent.
One is, in a word, merely asserting that one is afraid
of the symptoms which one dislikes in oneself, and more
particularly in other people; not that one can cure them.

Take this insistence on the external into the world of
politics, and what is it but fascism.^ It is saying that we
must suppress the effeminate, dark members of our
society (the Jews), we must arrange our facade to look
as well as possible, to appeal to the eye (the private
armies), we must drive the symptoms of decadence
underground. It is not surprising, then, that when
Lewis went to Germany, a few years before the Nazi
revolution, he was deeply impressed by the Hitler move-
ment, and found much to admire in its attack on the
fashionable decadence of the West End of Berlin. It is
worth pointing out, though, that the extensive brown
fa9ade, spread out to obliterate German homosexuality,
turned out to have within itself far deeper crevices than
anything it hid.

We may now consider, in the light of Lewis’s analytic
method, another book. The Invaders by William Plomer.
This book is not a satire, but it is a study of people who
drift. Except that Plomer has a very brilliant eye for
the external, this book is par excellence everything which
Lewis dislikes. A great many unemployed people con-
stantly drift from the provinces into London, and stay
there, somehow making a living, or they drift back again.

THE GREAT WITHOUT

215

A few of these Plomer selects as the Invaders: they are
essentially dumb oxen. They are the people to whom
things happen, who are acted upon, who have never sat
up and realized that they are living in the greatest crisis
the world has ever seen. Of course, in a well-regulated
fascist state, vsrriters, with their eyes well-drilled to look
at the creative, external lives, would ignore these human
viscera, these will-less heroes. They are Hemingway
heroes raised or reduced to the »th power. But Plomer
has written about them. But I am afraid that worse is
to follow. For another character in the novel is a ‘gent,’
Nigel, who has a homosexual friendship with the
drifter Chick, who joins the Guards. In this relation-
ship the will-lessness of two classes of society meets, as
it were, and joins hands. Chick is will-less, because he
drifts, submits to the army, becomes, as a soldier, the
incarnation of the willed as distinct from the will-ing.
He also becomes entangled with a girl who needs money,
which he must get from Nigel, and thus the money
passing from Nigel to him, from him to the girl, corrupts
and confuses all their relationships. Nigel, on the other
hand, is also will-less, because he exercises his developed
sensibility simply to understand and not to control his
affair with Chick.

Now, supposing we get Lewis to agree that the
subject-matter of The Invaders is all right as long as the
approach is satiric. For that seemed the point of his
attack on Hemingway. One can quite well imagine Nigel
being satirized: indeed, the novel leaves me wishing
rather that Plomer’s approach to him had been more
external, in the Lewis sense. But could anyone in his
senses externalize, that is to say satirize, the Invaders
themselves, because they are unemployed, because they
drift, and are controlled by the wills of others? Turn

2i6 in defence of A POLITICAL SUBJECT

now to The Awkward Age., The Apes of God, or W. H.
Auden’s The Orators, to take the work of three different
generations, and one sees at once that this kind of satire
is a game that can only be applied to a certain class.
It is essentially public school satire. Henry James’s and
Wyndham Lewis’s subjects came, it is true, from the
very best public schools. Auden’s selection is more
miscellaneous. The point is, though, that this kind of
satire is confined to a very small clique, both of writers
and readers. It is destructive, because it is lacking in
wide application: it is the image of Caliban raging at his
own face in the mirror: the writer, hemmed in by a
Bloomsbury or public school tradition, hates other mem-
bers of his clique because they bear features which he
recognizes in himself or his friends. Auden’s satire is
much wider than this, only because it has a revolutionary
application; but it does not altogether escape the charge
of being public or even preparatory school satire.

It seems, then, that if literature is suffering from a
neurosis, we cannot escape from it by ignoring it, and
by observing only the shell of our world, and attack-
ing our own faults as we find them in our friends.

XII

POETRY AND PITY

At this point it seems necessary in a short aside to con-
sider the case of artists who are political, but yet who write
primarily to express an attitude of mind: for instance,
love or pity.

There is a difference between a morality of love, and
an attitude of love. In expressing an attitude of love only,
a writer is implying that it is an attitude adequate to the
experience which he is describing.

Wilfred Owen, in the Preface to his Poems, makes
his attitude — which in any case is clear in his poetry—
doubly clear by a straightforward statement:

‘My subject is War, and the pity of War.

‘The poetry is in the pity.

‘Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense con-
solatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do to-day
is to warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.’

In other words, an attitude of pity— a pity which is
fierce and in no sense consolatory— is the only attitude
possible for him to adopt towards the War. But he fully
realizes that to another generation, a post-war generation,
pity would not suffice as the inspiration of poetry. The
poetry is only in the pity when the motive for pity is
quite overwhelming. An immense and terrifying pity is
the extreme unction of tragedy, the poetry in the pity
of the last act of King Lear, or in Greek tragedy. This
kind of pity was forced on to Owen, by his sense that the

217

2i8 in defence of A POLITICAL SUBJECT

War was quite beyond his control. The external circum-
stances of his suffering were forced on to him, and it was his
job to create a synthesis by which he could accept them :
he could not do more than accept them. But another
generation cannot just accept the War as if it were a
purely natural disaster. In order to achieve our synthesis,
analysis is required as well. And it seems that the analysis
must be in historical and in psychological terms. The
difficulty is to reconcile the history and the psychology.

Except in circumstances of catastrophic accident, or
of resignation to a predestined fate, pity is not an adequate
emotion in poetry. It tends to become negative, exhaust-
ing, sentimental, masochistic. The only way it can avoid
sentimentality is to plunge into extreme subjectivity and
become projected as self-pity.

In one of Owen’s last and most beautiful poems. Miners^
his feeling of pity seems to have reached a stage one step
beyond which would lead him to a subjective world:

‘I thought of some who worked dark pits
Of war, and died

Digging the rock where Death reputes
Peace lies indeed.

Comforted years will sit soft-chaired
In rooms of amber;

The years will stretch their hands, well-cheered
By our lives’ ember.

The centuries will burn rich loads
With which we groaned.

Whose warmth shall lull their dreaming lids
While songs are crooned.

But they will not dream of us poor lads
Lost in the ground.’

POETRY AND PITY

219

Beautiful as these lines are, one sees that the poet is
conjuring up an emotion of pity in order to achieve
them : he is not writing because he believes that the lives
of the men who dig coal and who die in wars could in
any way be altered, or, on the other hand, are in any
way justified. His one emotion is a passive grief for the
men and boys. The difficulty is, that poetry inspired
by pity is dependent on that repeated stimulus for its
inspiration. If Owen had survived the War, he would
presumably have been compelled either to become a
writer with some political philosophy, or else he must
have harked back constantly to his war memories for
inspiration. That has happened to other war writers,
who go back to the War in search of ghosts and horrors,
not in search of any explanations.

Owen may indeed have been a far greater loss than any
of us know; because he evidently realized that his war
poetry could only represent a transitional attitude, when
he wrote ‘All a poet can do to-day is to warn.’ He meant
that the next generation must occupy itself with different
problems.

In his few poems Owen did not merely make a record
of his experience; he made an architecture. He is not
dictated to, even by suffering. A great deal has been
written about his poetry, but I do not think that anyone
has pointed out how very different all his poems are from
each other. Each poem takes an entirely different aspect
of the War, centred always in some incident, and builds
round it. In the few notes which he left for the plan of
his book, one sees that each of these poems was meant
to contribute to a whole edifice: he had planned a book
of true poetry about the War, not a series of poems about
the War.

There are, of course, artists who live in the spirit of

OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

love he IS not merely rebelling against the manners of
bis time; he is implying that the conventional romantic
idea of love, of the sort which ‘makes the world go
round, is not an adequate attitude towards experience
for an artist who wants to produce good work.

Owen is an impersonal artist in a sense that James,
Joyce, ^ eats and Eliot are scarcely ever impersonal. He
is not objectiMng his private mental experience, and
‘thus escaping from personality.* The pressure of mean-
ing in his poetry is not the pressure of self-expression,
of his private utterance, but the pressure of a whole
world of everything that is not himself, of war, of an
actuality' that is scarcely even interpreted in his poetry',
but v;bkb Tt-Ctt^ted through it. In his art he is not
creating his own world, he is re-creating the external
world.

For this reason his technique, although it is striking
and original, is subsidiary to his meaning. Although his
use of assonance is a completely successful way of express-
ing what he has to say, one can quite well imagine his
war poetry' written in a different medium; in a very in-
dividual free verse, or dramatically, or in a use of con-

ventional forms as original and concentrated as, for
example, the sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins. His
style is not, in fact, indistinguishable from its content, it
is simply a very effectively invented means of conveying
it. Nor is it limited to a particular use: it has been
adapted by young writers far more effectively than the
styles of cither Eliot or Hopkins. I think it is true to
say that Owen is the most useful influence in modern
verse, although he is a lesser poet than Hopkins or Eliot
Eliot has proved a dangerous influence, because his styh

POETRY AND PITY

221

is dictated by the needs of his poetry, it does not merely
contain the poetry. As yet it has not been shown
whether the forms he has invented could hold the
experience of any other poet.

It follows from this that the medium of Joyce and
Eliot is identified with its content; in this sense it is
subjective, and, although it may influence other writers,
it cannot be adapted, like a fixed mode of verse, and used
as a container for quite other ideas. Eliot’s verse form is
not a container for certain ideas that struggle towards
expression: what is expressed in his verse, as well as
thought, is the form itself, and particular musical effects.
The subject of Eliot’s poetry is the poetry itself, and a
particular set of reactions to a subjective world which the
writer has largely invented, but which contains recog-
nizable fragments of the external world.

What one finds in Eliot is a remarkable capacity for
cerebral experience, a remarkable gift of annotation, a
remarkable neglect of nature. Owen’s poetry, on the
other hand, exists by its reference to some external
object: if it had not been the War, it might have been the
industrial towns, and the distressed areas.

224 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

The point is that it is almost impossible for an artist
to-day — a believing artist, one who is not simply an
individualist-anarchist— to live entirely in the present,
because the present is chaotic. If we want beliefs, or
even a view of history, we must either turn back to the
past, or we must exercise our imaginations to some degree,
so that we live in the future.

It is not a question of sticks for dahlias. The answer
to that remark is, ‘Don’t be a dahlia, and you won’t
need a stick.’ It is a question of what in the widest sense
is going to be the social or political subject of writing.
If the subject of writing is political justice and political
freedom, it is no longer possible with consistency to be
a writer who satirizes a small clique of literary dilettanti;
who insists on regarding only the surface of his characters,
who prides himself only on the eye; and on having an
eye which ignores the more emotive centres. Literary
fascism goes with political fascism. If, then, one believes
that freedom, justice and other moral qualities are desir-
able; if one wants to write about these things (I am not
saying or even implying that one should want to do so);
if one conceives that the subject of writing is the moral
life of one’s time, in the same way as the subject of Greek
Tragedy is moral, and Everyman is a morality, and the
subject of Tao Te Ching is the art of ruling and being
ruled; then to-day one is in a very difficult situation. The
precise difficulty is to write about this moral life in a way
that is significant: to find the real moral subject. The
emphasis of our realistic tradition is entirely on the reality
of externals; of nature, of mechanics, of acts. If one
speaks of any other kind of reality one is suspected of a
kind of idealism, which is rightly suspect: of projecting
one’s own hopes and fears, of inventing dreams in which
one fulfils translated sexual wishes. Yet the fact remains

WRITERS AND MANIFESTOS 225

that certain manifestations of what I call moral life are
perfectly real: as real as chairs and tables, and far more
dangerously alive than most human beings. Indeed, if
they are neglected, they draw attention to themselves
in wars and revolutions. Such realities are the lust for
power, the sense of guilt; and the most overwhelming of
all is a life which is much larger than individuals, the
whole life of the time, larger even than the personal life,
and threatening to destroy the personal life if it is not
realized and given room to develop.

I call all this as a subject ‘moral’ rather than ‘psycho-
logical,’ because I am concerned with a whole series of
conflicts which contribute to the stream of contemporary
life. I am not concerned with the sense of guilt and
the lust for power, analytically, but with the direction
of society produced by the complex of all of these. On
the whole, then, to call this general tendency the ‘moral’
life rather than the ‘psychological’ life seems, paradoxi-
cally, the more impartial term. For if I call it ‘psycho-
logical,’ I am bound to analyse and condemn certain
undesirable elements — the sense of guilt, and the lust
for power. If I call it moral I am simply concerned
with understanding the whole tendency, and accepting
that as the resolved and deepest life of our time.

‘We can no longer permit life to be shaped by a per-
sonified ideal, we must serve with all our faculties some
actual thing,’ Yeats has written in a recent preface.^
This seems to me true. The ‘actual thing’ is the true
moral or widely political subject that must be realized
by contemporary literature, if that literature is itself to
be moral and serious : that is to say, if it is to be the true
successor of James. Any other art will tend to become a
‘personified ideal.’ The weakness of Lawrence is in tl^^
1 The Words Upon the Window Pane,

226 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

tendency. He wrote about a kind of life which was serious
and real; but whereas he meant to write about people,
about the life around him, he tended, as he went on,
only to write about himself. For, in his search for values,
he invented a way of life that did not betray those values :
but, most unfortunately, it was only possible to himself.
It was the outcome of a personal struggle, and the result
dangerously bordered on the ‘personified ideal.’

It seems, then, that the position of writers who are
endeavouring to serve some ‘actual thing’ — that is, who
are endeavouring to write about it — is worth considering.
Cecil Day Lewis has said:

‘Yet living here.

As one between two massing powers I live
Whom neutrality cannot save
Nor occupation cheer.

None such shall be left alive :

The innocent wing is soon shot down
And private stars fade in the blood-red dawn
Where two worlds strive.

The red advance of life

Contracts pride, calls out the common blood.

Beats song into a single blade.

Makes a depth-charge of grief.

Move then with new desires.

For where we used to build and love
Is no man’s land, and only ghosts can live
Between two fires.’

The poem asserts that two worlds exist and are fight-

WRITERS AND MANIFESTOS

227

ing: the striving worlds are obviously intended to represent
the class war, or at all events the rivalry between revolution
and reaction. This contest is so important that neutrality
is impossible. ‘The innocent wing is soon shot down,
And private stars fade in the blood-red dawn.’ The poet
is evidently on the side of ‘The red advance of life,’
because he believes that ‘only ghosts can live between
two fires.’

The poem, then, is not only about Communism : it also
has a propagandist element: it argues, and some of the
argument is, to say the least, controversial. For example,
the simplification of issues might seem to some people
premature, if not grotesque. But this does not really
affect the real claim of the poem to value. The implicit
assertion of the poem is that it is about realities: that the
struggle between two worlds is real— as real as the de-
scriptions of environment in novels— that the material
of the poem is life.

If I am right in saying that the struggle of Communism
or Socialism against the anti-Socialist forces of the whole
world exists, I think that the reader, in judging left-wing
literature, must not judge it in the same way as he argues
against Communism. It is not a question of whether he
thinks the premises are false, but of whether the pre-
mises are about realities, in the sense that there are
political and moral realities which are more enduring than
the external world of literary realism. What he should
ask is— Does this Communist approach lead to a greater
and more fundamental understanding of the struggle
affecting our whole life to-day ?

Now, one of the chief claims of Communism as a
political creed is that it is materialist. The materialist
conception of history, the theory of surplus value, the
idea of crystallized labour: all these are solids, they are

228 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

material subject-matter and yet move in the world of
ideas. The writer who grasps anything of Marxist theory,
feels that he is moving in a world of reality, and in a
purposive world, not merely a world of obstructive and
oppressive things.

Lastly, it is as well to remember that perhaps the most
fundamental of all beliefs illustrated by drama and poetry,
in all history, is the idea of justice. We live in an age
when we have become conscious of great social injustice,
of the oppression of one class by another, of nationalities
by other nations. Communism, or Socialism in its com-
pleted form, offers a just world— a world in which wealth
is more equally distributed, and the grotesque accumula-
tion of wealth by individuals is dispersed : in which nations
have no interest in destroying each other in the manner
of modern war, because the system of competitive trade
controlled by internecine and opposed capitalist interests
is abolished.

These aims are so broad and so just that no amount
of abuse and sneering can affect the people who hold
them. It is no use telling me, for example, that I am a
bourgeois-intellectual, that I know nothing, or next to
nothing, of the proletariat. All that and a lot more
may be true. The point is, though, that if I desire social
justice I am not primarily concerned with myself, I am
concerned with bringing into being a world quite external
to my own interests; in the same way as when one writes
a poem one is allowing the poem to have its own, im-
personal, objective being; one is not shoving oneself
into it.

The Socialist artist is concerned with realizing in his
own work the ideas of a classless society: that is to say,
applying those ideas to the life around him, and giving them
their reality. He is concerned with a change of heart.

WRITERS AND MANIFESTOS 229

He is not primarily concerned with ways and means,
and he is not paralysed by the argument that the economic
system is rigid. The economic system was made for
man, and not man for the economic system; so that if
man changes — that is to say, if he has a new and strong
conception of justice— the economic system will also
change.

It also follows that the writer is primarily interested
in man, and not in systems, not even in a good economic
system. Systems are rigid, and they must always be
forced externally — by external criticism — to change. In
that sense, art, because it insists on human values, is a
criticism of life.

Good architecture is a criticism of slums. Good paint-
ing is a criticism of the pictures we have, the clothes we
wear, all the appearances with which we surround our-
selves. Good poetry is a criticism of language, of the
way in which we express ourselves, the direction of our
thoughts, the words we hand down to our children.
Our industrial civilization has proved almost impervious
to that criticism of life which we find in architecture,
painting, music and poetry. Art has been resisted, and
the artists have been driven to form cliques with a private
language and private jokes. But no system can afford to
be without the criticism of art. The whole point of artists
adopting a revolutionary position, is that their interests
may become social, and not anti-social, and that their
criticism may help to shape a new society.

When one considers the position of artists in a Socialist
state, it is well, therefore, to remember that the art which
has ‘roots in the masses’ must be free to tell the truth
and to criticize life. Lenin said, ‘Art belongs to the
people. It ought to extend with deep roots into the very
thick of the broad toiling masses. It ought to be intelli-

230 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

gible to these masses and loved by them. And it ought
to unify the feeling, thought and will of these masses,
elevate them. It ought to arouse and develop artists
among them.’

A democratic art has always been popular with certain
writers, who have appealed in their work from a small
set of fellow artists to the people. The point of
such an appeal is that by widening his audience the
artist also widens and deepens his subject-matter: he
draws strength from deeper roots. The writer who is
starving because he cannot reach any audience but a
small clique, and who finds the whole literature, painting
and music of his time a prey to the same cliquiness,
will suspect that there is something wrong with our
sectarian literature. Now, whatever may be the faults of
Russian writers to-day, they do at least reach a wide
audience, and they do succeed in writing about matters
which passionately concern the people. In order to awaken
this wide interest they don’t play down to their audience
in the fashion of our popular writers.

Nevertheless, Russian literature suffers, or has until
recently suffered, from its own sectarianism, which con-
sisted in the establishment of what amounted to a
monopoly of publishing and criticism by a small group
of writers who formed an organization called RAPP
(Russian Association of Proletarian Writers). The busi-
ness of this union, and of various companion societies was
to insist on the proletarianization of art, and to persecute
artists who were not correct in their party ideology.
Max Eastman has written a book, called Artists in
Uniform^ which is an extremely prejudiced account of the
activities of RAPP. He is clearly carrying on a bitter
personal vendetta against the editors of the American
Gsmmunist periodical. New Masses^ which he finds to be

WRITERS AND MANIFESTOS 231

subservient to Moscow. He is also a Trotskyist, and
a violent critic of the Stalin dictatorship. He draws
attention to all the blunders of RAPP, but he does
not emphasize that some writers have been well treated.
For example, he ignores Nekrassov, and he is so anxious
to prove that RAPP has destroyed all literary talent in
the Soviet, that Gladkov, to take one example, is not
mentioned in his book. In spite of these defects of
over-statement, the indictment he draws up is alarming,
and, in some ways, almost overwhelming. There are
many examples of persecution by RAPP. The suicides
of Yessenin and Maiakovsky may have been inevitable,
since their faulty ‘individualism’ perhaps made it, in
any case, impossible for them to adapt themselves to
the revolution. Far more serious is the case of Zamyatin,
whose novel. We, was not published in the Soviet, but
was pirated in a Prague emigre magazine : this misfortune
was used as a frame-up against Zamyatin, and he was
compelled to live in exile. Romanov, who is well known
in England for his novel. Three Pairs of Silk Stockings,
was so unfortunate as to receive a favourable review in
the London New Statesman, in which the reviewer re-
marked that it was a mystery that Romanov’s book
should be allowed to appear in Soviet Russia. The
mystery did not cease, but Romanov was compelled to
recant publicly. Another writer, Pilnyak, on being
charged with counter-revolutionary tendencies, managed
to make an art of humiliating himself and begging for
Marxist instruction; he has become one of the most
prosperous writers in the Union.

Since RAPP no longer exists, Eastman’s indictment
may seem irrelevant, because I do not suppose that
even the Soviet Government would now defend RAPP’S
actions. But he holds that matters are now little, if at

232 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

all, better, and that RAPP was only liquidated because
its destructive function was completely performed. The
next few years will show whether or not this accusa-
tion is just: but meanwhile Eastman’s charges should
be read and considered. It is not enough to dismiss
him as a counter-revolutionary, if what he says is true.
The following principles were dictated to the Kharkov
literary congress, a meeting of Communist writers from
every part of the world, by Auerbach, a young representa-
tive of the bureaucracy.^

(1) Art is a class weapon.

(2) Artists are to abandon ‘individualism’ and the fear
of strict ‘discipline’ as petty bourgeois attitudes.

(3) Artistic creation is to be systematized, organized,
‘collectivized,’ and carried out according to the plans
of a central staff like any other soldierly work.

(4) This is to be done under the ‘careful and yet firm
guidance of the Communist Party.’

(5) Artists and writers of the rest of the world are to
learn how to make proletarian art by studying the ex-
perience of the Soviet Union.

(6) ‘Every proletarian artist must be a dialectical
materialist. The method of creative art is the method of
dialectic materialism.’

(7) ‘Proletarian literature is not necessarily created by
the proletariat, it can also be created by writers from the
petty bourgeoisie,’ and one of the chief duties of the
proletarian writer is to help the non-proletarian writers
‘overcome their petty bourgeois character and accept the
viewpoint of the proletariat.’

It is evident that the aim of this manifesto is to convert
art into an instrument that can be used for party purposes.
It is not the business of the artist to see, but to conform.

* See Chap. I of Artists in Uniform by Max Eastman.

WRITERS AND MANIFESTOS 233

He must not be a two-edged instrument which might
turn against the party. It is his business to go where he
is sent and to observe what he is told.

There is not the least doubt that a great many Com-
munists look on art purely as a party instrument. To
take a small instance, I read in a proposed manifesto
sent by Alec Brown to Left Review^ that ‘during the
initial period of our magazine [it is] most important
to carry on rigorous criticism of all highbrowism, in-
tellectualism, abstract rationalism, and similar dilettan-
tism.’ And what do these abusive terms mean, one
may ask The answer is only too simple : it is everything
that WE happen not to agree with ideologically.

It may be argued that there is a severe censorship
now in almost every European country except Russia,
and that even in England there is no longer any great
freedom of speech. But there is a great difference
between even the severest and most stupefying censorship
and the attempt to regard art as a mere instrument in
party hands, which is illustrated in the Kharkov manifesto.
The difference is that censorship cuts or bans books
when they are already written: the principles laid down
in this manifesto order the manner in which books should
be written, what they should be about, and what attitude
the writer should adopt to his subject. No censorship
has ever gone so far as this. This instrumentalization
permits too the rise of a school of critics whose business
simply is to apply the canon. To attack writers because
they are bourgeois, because their novels, if they are
about life as they know it, are not proletarian, or, if
they are about the working-classes, because their attitude
is not revolutionary enough. In July 1934 an article
appeared in New Masses attacking Auden, Day Lewis,
^ Left Reviea-, No. 3, December 1934.

234 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

and myself, because we were aristocrats, athletes, and so
on. Auden’s parents, it said, were Welsh squires, and
we were all of exalted birth. Of course there was no
word of truth in these attacks, in fact there was no fact
at all in the whole article that was not invented. In any
case, the facts, even if true, would to most people have
seemed irrelevant. But not to this essayist. His business
was to prove that we were aristocrats, and then to show
that our verse was counter-revolutionary. His humble
duty was to discredit us, and that he performed, quite
regardless of any sense of truth. In Russia, a few years
ago, such attacks were a commonplace, and there was
no appeal against them.

Against this, one must set some statements by writers
and critics in Literature of the Peoples of the U.S.S.R.,
Vols. 7-8. Some of the declarations here seem admirable
and honest. For instance, A. Selivenovsky, in an essay
on the Poetry of Socialism, says: ‘To become an artist of
socialism means, if you come from the intelligentsia,
that not only must you be convinced that the ideas of
socialism are correct, but that you must alter your previ-
ously-formed poetic style. It means that you must
overcome and discard many of your former ideas about
life : you must change your way of looking at the world.
But this alteration does not imply, of course, that the
subject-matter, imagery, and style of the poet of socialism
is made to lose all individuality, is reduced to complete
uniformity. This is far from the case. The fact is that
it is socialism that ensures the all-round development
and growth of the human individual.’

This seems to me excellent. Good too is V. Kaverin’s
essay on literature and science, in which he pleads for a
more scientific subject-matter in modern literature. C.
Zelinsky is narrower: ‘Criticism acquires a function of

WRITERS AND MANIFESTOS 235

a principally intellectual-educational order: to struggle
against the heritage of capitalism and consciousness by
exposing it in art.’ However, he has hard, almost sinister
things to say of Voronsky, a figure of the recent past.
‘Voronsky based his conception of art on the works of
Tolstoy and Proust, writers in whose work direct ob-
servation is most prominent. In such a system of views,
however, the very core of the Marxian conception of
literature, its very heart, class activity, was lost. It was
not by chance, therefore, that Voronsky proved to be
allied with Trotskyism.’

Even officially, the position of literature in Communist
society is extremely controversial. All I want to emphasize
here is that if one is on the side of the greatest possible
degree of freedom, if one insists that one should write as
one cares and about what one wishes, one is not a traitor
to the Socialist cause. No system is complete in itself as a
solution of the bad system which it supersedes. If there
is to be any sort of freedom or improvement, one has got
to push and even sometimes fight the systems one most
approves of. Unless artists insist on their right to criticize,
to be human, and even ‘humanitarian,’ Communism will
become a frozen era, another ice age.

Lastly, the view of Lenin was not at all that of a bureau-
crat. Polonsky, in his Outline of the Literary Movement
of the Revolutionary Epoch, relates how he pencilled com-
ments on an article of Pletnev, On the Ideological Front,
which was printed in Pravda, Sept. 27th, 1922.^ ‘ “The

creation of a new proletarian class culture is the funda-
mental goal of the Proletcult,’’ wrote Pletnev. “Ha,
Ha!’’ There are many other comments and remarks,
such as “human!’’ and “What a mess!’’ surviving. In
two places he writes “Bunk.” ’

* Polonsky’s article forms an appendix to Max Eastman’s book.

XIV

UPWARD, KAFKA AND VAN DER
POST

It would be irrelevant here to attempt any survey of
Communist literature. An enormous wealth of such litera-
ture exists, mostly with a proletarian subject-matter, but
in an extremely old-fashioned style and frame-work. In
the case of Russian literature this reversion, not to the
style of the Russian classics, but to the styles of the
jeuilleton and the thriller, may be necessary, since the
phase of literary experiment hardly at any moment
affected the audience for which these new artists are
writing: it concerned only an audience of writers. The
starting-point for the writer who wishes to reach a large
working-class audience is not Proust, nor even Tolstoy,
it is, at worst. The Happy Magazine^ and at best, Gorky,
in his most tramping moods.

Anyone who is interested in the subject will find plenty
of exceptions to my generalizations: particularly in the
novels of Ehrenbourg, Gladkov, and Romanov. But here
I am primarily concerned with the ‘highbrow’ literature
of young English Communists. This is not in any sense
proletarian: it is advance-guard experimental writing
imbued with Communist ideology. I am thinking here
particularly of some of Auden’s poems (for example, of
The Dance of Death), of the anthologies New Signatures
and New Country, and in particular of Edward Upward’s
two short stories in New Country. As interesting are
several books, which although not Communist in tendency,

236

UPWARD, KAFKA AND VAN DER POST 237

have as their subjects Communism or working-class move-
ments. One of the most interesting proletarian novels of
the last few years is Living, by Henry Green, a book
that seems to have been almost neglected. Plomer’s
novel, The Invaders, which I have already discussed,
also qualifies as a proletarian novel.

The two works which I am going to discuss in this
chapter seem to me particularly significant, because the
one (Edward Upward’s story) is, from the Communist
standpoint, ideologically correct: the other, Van der
Post’s novel, In a Province, because it is a serious political
novel which is a complete refutation of the revolutionary
tactics of Communists.

Edward Upward’s short story, Sunday (which appeared
in New Country), is simply an account of the thoughts
of a man who is living a very insignificant life in a
lodging-house room. His Sunday is spent in nervously
meditating on his own inefficiency: particularly because
the next day, in the office, he knows that he will be
obliged to use a rotary duplicator (actually the incident
of the duplicator is not very well chosen, because when it
is first introduced, one naturally thinks that it has to do
with his Communist activities rather than his office work).
While he is thinking in this way, rationalizing, nervously
reassuring himself, he has what one can only call a vision
of the purpose of history.

The story opens with an account of his returning to
lunch after a walk in the park. His thoughts are directed
to the purposive nature of civic consciousness, as shown
in the arrangement of the park.

‘Why did the council put flood-lights in the trees
round the fountain and build a thatched hut for ducks
on an island.? Not merely in order to give the contract
to their friends or because it’s the fashion, but also be-

238 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

cause they want the town to have a good name with visitors.
That’s what civic consciousness really means, and it’s a
perfectly sound business proposition, I suppose.’

Like most moderns. Upward’s hero is well soaked
in what Cambridge dons (the more advanced ones) call
‘contemporary sensibility.’ He is nervy, and unsure of
his own inner self: when he looks beyond himself, he
receives the authentic, guaranteed W aste Land reactions,
‘a sense of desolation, of uncertainty, futility.’

‘I am going back to my lodgings for lunch. Who will
be there Only the table, the flower with protruding
stamens arching from its jug like a sabre-toothed tiger,
the glass of custard, pleated apple-green satin behind the
fretwork fleur-de-lys panel of the piano. The whole after-
noon and evening will be free. Realize that, realize what
I could do. All the possibilities of thinking and feeling,
exploration and explanation and vision, walking in
history as among iron and alabaster and domes, focusing
the unity of the superseded with the superseding, recog-
nizing the future, vindicating the poets, retiring between
pillars as Socrates, desperate as Spartacus, emerging with
Lenin, foreseeing the greatest of all eras. But unless I
am very careful I shall sit on the sofa trying not to go
on reading the paper.’

This is beautifully observed and written. After
noticing this, the sureness of structure and clearness of
vision, one notices that there is after all a great difference
in the attitude of this man, and the attitude say, of
Prufrock, or any of the heroes of James. In the first
place, he is neither of those exaggerated modern types,
the ‘special case,’ the man of enormous sensibility who
does nothing but feel and be ‘extraordinary,’ and the
ordinary case, the bank clerk, who is very dull but feels
a lot just the same. He is a man who knows exactly his

UPWARD, KAFKA AND VAN DER POST 239

place in society, and has neither an exaggerated sense of
his importance, nor his unimportance. He is more in the
position of Prufrock than of a James hero (or heroine,
like the post-office girl of In the Cage\ but if one compares
him with Prufrock, one instantly notices an aspect of
Prufrock that is not apparent. Prufrock is, in fact,
rather pleased with himself at being such a nonentity.
There is an air almost of self-congratulation about such
lines as these:

‘No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two.

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool.
Deferential, glad to be of use.

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times indeed, almost ridiculous —

Almost, at times, the Fool.’

The final caress of self-congratulation falls in the last
line, for everyone knows that in any romantic drama,
by far the cleverest character is the Fool. This romantic
self-regarding tradition goes back to the lines of Othello:

‘Soft you; a word or two before you go.

I have done the state some service, and they know’t.’

To-day the egoism is not so noble and direct. It has
taken the form of a snobbery that sensibility is an end in
itself, that the person who feels a great deal, who is
sensitive, is in some way vastly superior to the person
who behaves responsibly and wilfully. Prufrock appeals
to this snobbery, because the implication of his lines is

240 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

that he is such a vastly superior sensibility that he does
not really want to do anything.

Now I believe that one of the healthier symptoms of
some recent writing is a reaction from this insidious
self-congratulation. Compare Upward’s story with a
passage from W. H. Auden’s Airman's Journal in The
Orators \

‘I know that I am I, living in a small way in a temperate
zone, blaming father, jealous of son, confined to a few
acts often repeated, easily attracted to a limited class of
physique, yet envying the simple life of the gut, desiring
the certainty of the breast or prison, happiest sawing
wood, only knowledge of the real disturbances in the
general law of the dream; the quick blood fretting against
the slowness of the hope; a unit of life, needing water
and salt, that looks for a sign.’

This is the attitude of a person who is able to accept
himself at the estimate which society has of him. Humility
of this sort is necessary to any writer who wishes to have
a political understanding of our time. For the extremes
of egotism, whether they are megalomaniac, or self-
debasing, thrust him back upon himself: they are the
‘personified ideal.’

Upward’s hero goes on to consider the various attitudes
which he may take up to the duplicator.

‘I can’t just forbid myself to be seriously interested in
the success or failure of the copies, and then, if they fail,
highmindedly submit to a thrashing from a slave-owner.
No one would attempt to thrash or torture me, I should
simply be asked to find another job. . . . Things may have
been different under the feudal barons. Then you were
someone’s property and you might be thrashed but you
wouldn’t be abandoned. That’s what gave colour to the
God the Father theory.’

UPWARD, KAFKA AND VAN DER POST 241

He reflects that he is not one of the responsible classes,
one of the ‘liars and twisters.’ ‘I am much nearer to those
other blunderers who, cynically regarding as a dishonour
and a horror the work they have to do every day, try to
preserve the old integrity intact within the blind enclosure
of their minds. That is the maddest mistake of all.

‘It is mad to be content to hate every external danger,
to be an ostrich, to accept any explanation which mini-
mizes the importance of material gains or losses, to fail
to try and find a real solution. It’s no use pretending
you are splendidly or redeemingly or even interestingly
doomed.’

I quote extensively, because what the hero of the story
is criticizing is really a whole cultural attitude: it is the
attitude of many of the writers whom I have been dis-
cussing in this book: those who try to preserve the old
integrity, who considered themselves interestingly
doomed.

In the same way as Lawrence, when the heroes of
his stories reject the ideal of love, himself rejects that
attitude as a creative attitude for his fiction, so
Upward rejects the attitudes of being an ostrich or
preserving one’s individual integrity. What this story
reflects is in fact a changed consciousness towards
politics.

The man in his momentous walk through the park
has his authentic vision as significant in its way as the
vision of the hero of The Ambassadors, in another more
aristocratic garden. The message which Strether de-
livered on the earlier occasion, was ‘Live, live!’ The
vision in Sunday is one of the purpose in history:

‘But history will not always be living here. It will not
always wear these sordid and trashy clothes. History
abandoned the brutal fatherliness of the castle, and it

242 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

will abandon Sunday and the oppression of the office too.
It will go to live elsewhere. It is going already to live
with the enemies of suffering, of suffering beside which
yours shows like silly hysteria, with people who are not
content to suppress misery in their minds but are going
to destroy the more obvious material causes of misery in
the world.’

The story ends with a personal decision of the man
who is thinking these thoughts : ‘ He will go to the small
club behind the Geisha Caff. He will ask whether
there is a meeting to-night. At first he will be regarded
with suspicion, even taken for a police spy. And quite
rightly. He will have to prove himself, to prove that he
isn’t a mere neurotic, an untrustworthy freak. It will
take time. But it is the only hope. He will at least have
made a start.’

This story is remarkable, because it shows that it is
possible for a writer to create by going forward into a
new tradition, as well as going back, like Eliot in The
Rock, into an old one. Upward has a political or moral
or sociological vision which is as remarkable as that of
Franz Kafka; the forces which he symbolizes seem so clear
that they convince us even more than the realities which
symbolize them. Another story called The Colleagues,
also published in New Country, is an account of the
authentic vision of a young school-master standing in
the preparatory school playground and watching his
colleagues punt a ball :

T>loyd has regathered the ball. He’s perfectly aware
that I’m watching. Receiving a long pass and holding it
neatly he began to run. He swerved, sold the dummy,
fended off a tackle, punted over the head of the full-
back. Knee up, rigid, a clean full punch with the instep.
He sprang, he raced towards the tennis courts. Bucking,

UPWARD, KAFKA AND VAN DER POST 243

heavily agile, with jerking shoulders. Baboon or antelope.
Going all out, broad-backed in a tight sweater. How
terrific. How electrically vile. He plunged, he touched
down, stumbling among tree roots. It’s a vision. I am
palpably standing here. There are no other witnesses.
If there were they would have nothing to report except
that a young preparatory school-master has kicked a
football. I have seen a horror which no one else would
have been privileged to see. For an instant I must have
been authentically insane. Bunyan saw mountains shin-
ing over the houses. I’ve had an hallucination. Probably
voluntary. It’s a reward. It’s going to happen again.
In the night. At lunch. Everywhere. An award of
power. This is only the beginning. A genuinely religious
delusion. I am very glad.’

The last two sentences are extremely important; for
the most significant fact about Upward’s two stories is
that they are religious. The visionary conviction can
only be described as religious, and the complete and quiet
solution of Sunday— to go to the meetings at the club
behind the Geisha Caf^ — is the religious resolve to par-
take in some ritual. Again his vision of his enemy is
religious. He sees his enemy in Hell, as an external and
hated object, not as a projected element of himself.
Stylistically and in his attitude, Upward resembles, and
perhaps owes much to, Kafka. Kafka has the same vision
of authority: but he is in doubt whether the authority
is purposive: he is only certain that it is real. There is
no solution in Kafka, and for that reason his stories
are always inconclusive. The Castle is unfinished, be-
cause there could be no conclusion to it. What is
established is that the power which directs the village
from the Castle above it is authoritative and undisputed:
but whether it is inane or sensible is unknowable. The

244 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

peculiar fascination of Kafka is that he is a visionary
who doubted his own visions: the vision is completely
convincing and overwhelming; but, unlike any other
visionary, he questions his vision. The mere flooding
conviction of authority in the universe is not enough, if
the power seems wasted, untidy and purposeless. His
vision of society is built around the sense of authority
pervading the whole life. For example, there is his legend
of The Great W all of China :

‘Fifty years before the first stone was laid the art of
architecture, and especially that of masonry, had been
proclaimed as the most important branch of knowledge
throughout the whole area of a China that was to be
walled round, and all other arts gained recognition only
in so far as they had reference to it. I can still remember
quite well us standing as small children, scarcely sure
on our feet, in our teacher's garden, and being ordered
to build a sort of wall out of pebbles : and then the teacher,
girding up his robe, ran full tilt against the wall, of
course knocking it down, and scolded us so terribly for
the shoddiness of our work that we ran weeping in all
directions to our parents. A trivial incident, but significant
of the spirit of the time.’

The nausea and despair which is the core of his work
is revealed in a later passage:

‘In the office of the command— where it was and who
sat there no one whom I have asked knew then or knows
now— in that office one may be certain that all human
thoughts and desires were revolved, and counter to them
all human aims and fulfilments. And through the window
the reflected splendours of divine worlds fell on the hands
of the leaders as they traced their plans.’

The centre of this society, existing and elaborately
organized, with a complete system of morality functioning

UPWARD, KAFKA AND VAN DER POST 245

only to promote the existence of one external aim — a Wall
—is then a blank — a pious hope, a wish, a poem. Here one
sees that Kafka has, more than any other writer, plunged
into the destructive element: his vision of society is
authoritative, ironically religious, and nihilist. Upward
in his stories offers a solution to the question that Kafka
could not answer, by replying that the purpose of social
morality is the transformation of society itself, a historic
act of the will, the volition of ‘people who are not content
to suppress misery in their minds but are going to destroy
the more obvious material causes of misery in the world.’

Laurens van der Post’s novel is a book of a kind
which will be more familiar to most readers. It is a
biographical study of a young Dutchman, Johan van
Bredepoel. The book opens with an account of his first
serious illness, when he is twenty-five years old. We are
evidently at a turning-point of his life, but we are not
asked to consider the years that follow this illness, but
his childhood and his youthful experiences which precede
it. However, it is very important that the book opens
with this illness, because it crystallizes the experiences
of all his past life, amounting to a mental struggle which
was doomed to express itself in a crisis of the body.

The scene of the book now shifts to the past, logically
enough, because the explanation of the illness lies in the
past. We are given an account of his home, of his
puritanical Boer upbringing, of how he is taught to
despise the coloured people. However, there are already
rifts in his complacency, intuitions which disturb him,
which do not fit into his surroundings but suggest a more
consistent future. For example, there is the occasion
when his tutor, Meneer Broecksma, finds his diary, and
starts a discussion which finally shocks his pupil:

‘. . . Have you so little appetite for life in you.^ Tell

246 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

me, for instance, haven’t you noticed what a good figure
that girl Johanna has? I bet you haven’t! but just look
at her, there’s something for you to write about.’

‘But, Meneer Broecksmal’ Johan exclaimed, overcome
with surprise. ‘She’s black!’

‘Black! Of course she’s black; I’m not blind,’ the old
man replied more warmly than seemed necessary. ‘But
that doesn’t make any difference to the fact that she is very
beautiful. It’s necessary to have grown up in this awful
country not to have seen that. Every time I look at her,
I feel that we lose a hell of a lot by being civilized. Look
at her yourself and be inspired!’

Subsequently his tutor was dismissed and Johan knew
that the reason was his admiration of the black girl.
These things left a deep impression on his puzzled mind.
It was not, however, until he moved to the town of Port
Benjamin that he became really interested in the lives of
the black people. His interest was partly a reaction from
his disgust at the lives of the white people, the inhabitants
of his boarding-house, ‘Eagle’s Nest.’ In particular, he
became friendly with a young negro, Kenon, who was a
servant in the boarding-house. He used to give Kenon
money to send each month to his parents. The effect of
Port Benjamin on Kenon was disastrous. He became
drugged and overwhelmed by the life of cheap cinemas
and brothels. He was sent to prison for six months for
becoming involved in a fight which took place at a
brothel, and for being drunk.

In this book, the unhappy life of Kenon becomes,
as it were, a projection of Johan’s interest in politics.
The seriousness of this one case makes him realize the
whole racial problem, and at the same time it expresses
the depth of his realization. On the one hand, he is an
exile from the whites, who regard him as a traitor; on

UPWARD, KAFKA AND VAN DER POST 247

the other hand, he is involved in a terrible spiritual struggle
with the communist agitator, Burgess. This struggle has
its own violent projections, culminating in a riot, for
which Burgess is responsible, and in which some of the
natives whom he has enlisted are killed. Kenon is one
of those who are shot.

The book would not be so living if van Bredepoel,
because he is the central character who is struggling to
achieve a balance of opposing forces, were himself por-
trayed as balanced and perfect. He is a rather weak man,
who is extremely unwilling to be drawn into affairs
which are not his own. In him this is culpable, because
it amounts to a refusal to recognize his real interests in
life, since he is interested in justice and freedom. Nothing
shows this more clearly than his relationship with Kenon,
for whom he has a feeling amounting to love. Yet one
feels that his love for Kenon is primarily a moral rather
than a sexual feeling: or to put this in another way, his
dissatisfaction with the society in which he is living has
thwarted the normal outlet for his love, which has
emerged in this spiritualized homosexual form. His child-
hood experiences and the incident of the black girl now
take on a new aspect, for one sees that they amounted to
a realization that his whole environment was false, that
his parents’ happiness was based on false assumptions
and an easy acceptance of injustice.

Van Bredepoel’s weakness is demonstrated by his
treatment of Kenon. Although he behaves generously
to the native, on two or three occasions he omits to act
when by acting strongly he might have saved Kenon.
He has, however, a power of reflexion; of regarding
himself objectively, and of learning from his own ex-
periences, which sometimes atones for weakness of
action: an ability to discuss things and accept criticism

248 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

which is not possible to stronger characters, who dare
not admit any criticism which might thwart them. The
sociological and moral questions of the book might be
re-stated on another plane by asking whether van Brede-
poel is weak or strong: for if he was able to form a
synthesis of his conflicting experiences, it is difficult to
dismiss him as weak.

This book ends, as I have said, with a description of a
riot, in which the police break up a meeting organized
by Burgess. The tall, thin, nervous, consumptive, idea-
listic agitator, Burgess, is one of the best characters in
the book. It is this riot which resolves Johan van Brede-
poel. Afterwards, Burgess is still talking about his
‘benighted system,’ although he himself is as responsible
as anyone for Kenon’s death. Johan turns on him:

‘It’s the system, always the system, and yet again the
system, for you. You are always beating your wings
against the system. I’m sick of hearing about the system.
The system is only an approximation, a reflexion of the
rules that govern the little acts of each one of us. Only
it’s an approximation so big that if you place all the
emphasis on it, the individual loses the sense of the
responsibility for his little share in it. It seems to me
fatal. The starting- and finishing-point is in the heart of
each man. At one time the responsibility for action was
placed on the individual, and I think the world was
relatively a good deal happier. But to-day, if a man is a
thief or a murderer, we no longer blame the man, we
blame his environment. If a man is poor and hasn’t
enough to eat, we don’t say that he has been lazy or has
made no consistent effort to better himself, we blame the
system. If a man rapes a woman, or walks down the
street and opens his fly to a crowd, we don’t blame his
lack of self-control; we say, “What can you expect of a

UPWARD, KAFKA AND VAN DER POST 249

system which forces such terrible sex-taboos on us?”
It’s always the system. Even scientists and philosophers
have rushed in to help people like you. Man, they tell
you, is only a machine; put him in a certain environment
and he must react in a definite and calculable way. He
cannot help himself, only his conditioned reflexes can.
And what conditions these reflexes? Environment. Oh
yes! The ground has been well ploughed! You have
all the rationalization for your attacks on the system that
you can want. Only man is losing the sense of his in-
tegrity, the sense of his responsibility to himself. He is
already, for you, someone who can be improved merely
by increasing his income. Everyone wants to improve
the system under which he lives and not himself, and as
he, or a collection of people like him, make the system,
it all ends in no improvement, no responsibility. Take
you yourself. What have you done this afternoon ? I
haven’t heard you utter a word of reproach against your
share in it, all you’ve done is to come back howling
about the system again!’

He goes on :

‘. . . Listen, the unjust man, the selfish man, the cruel
man, will act always according to his lights. The system
is only a garment round the human heart; it does not
give shape to the heart, it takes its own shape from the
heart. I agree with you that some garments fit better
than others, but yours seems to me not a garment but
a strait-jacket, which man will have to burst if he is to
survive. Under your system the just will still be just,
the unjust still unjust, we will be no farther forward,
and you’ll have put the world through a period of
bloodshed and anarchy in vain. Your enemy and mine
in this country is not the system but the heart of every
white man. You can’t legislate a man’s heart away.’

250 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

Laurens van der Post’s novel seems to me particularly
relevant to my discussion, because it is a book which
has as its subject revolutionary politics, but which is not
propagandist. It is scarcely necessary to point out that
to any Gjmmunist this book would seem counter-revolu-
tionary, and that in Russia it would presumably be
banned. The vice of revolutionary literature is not the
material which it takes as its subject-matter— that is its
greatest virtue— but that it permits only one interpreta-
tion of that material. One can quite well imagine how
a Communist writer would have dealt with van der
Post’s material. The moment Johan came into contact
with Burgess, all sense of inquiry and speculation would
have been abandoned, Burgess would have been accepted
as an angel and van Bredepoel would have become his
ally. Kenon would have been glorified as a martyr of
the revolution, and Johan would have been able to con-
gratulate himself on helping his friend along the road
towards such a glorious death.

The fact is that to make this a propagandist novel,
van der Post would have had to make assumptions
which are destructive to art. These assumptions all
amount to an assertion of knowledge that the writer
does not possess, and which the reader knows he does
not possess. It is destructive for an artist to say that
he knows something which he only believes or hopes
to be true. For example, to say that I am on the side
of the proletariat, that I shall fight for their cause, may be
just. To say that the proletariat is better than any other
class, that the proletarian revolution is the historic
future of the world, is to blind myself as an artist. It is
the business of artists to insist on human values. If there
is need for a revolution, it is these human values that
will make the revolution.

XV

THE AIRMAN, POLITICS AND
PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

I HAVE suggested, in the previous chapter, by quoting van
der Post’s novel, that one way of testing the value of a
possible Communist literature is by considering not what
is contained under that heading, but what is excluded
from it. One sees then how narrow and sectarian a basis
Communism as a creative philosophy may become, and
one begins to understand the difficulty of the writers
who organized the persecutions of RAPP. For clearly,
if there is a Communist way in which van der Post
should have written his book, it is inadmissible that
he should write it in any other way. This would be, I
suppose, the point of view of a Soviet writer. But there
are many other examples. If the reader is interested in
Communist art, he should consider, in the course of his
daily reading, how many statements on the problems of
contemporary life which he reads would seem heresy to
the ideal anti-religious, proletarian artist. For example,
when I was thinking a good deal of these matters I
copied out into a notebook the following from C. G.
Jung’s The Secret of the Golden Flower:

‘Only on the basis of an attitude which renounces none
of the values won in the course of Christian development,
but which, on the contrary, tries with Christian charity
and forbearance to accept the humblest things in oneself,
will a higher level of consciousness and culture be possible.’

Now I found myself in entire agreement with this; nor

251

252 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

would I feel able to reject it because I felt it did not fit
in with a system of thought of which I in some respects
approved.

A few days later I read the following sonnet, by Cecil
Day Lewis:

‘Yes, why do we all, seeing a communist, feel
small ? That small

Catspaw ruffles our calm— how comes it? That
touch of storm

Brewing, shivers the torches even in this vault?
And the shame

Unsettles a high esteem ? Here it is. There fall

From him shadows of what he is building; bold
and tall —

For his sun has barely mastered the misted horizon
—they seem.

Indeed he casts a shadow, as among the dead will some

Living one. It is the future walking to meet us all.

Mark him. He is only what we are, mortal. Yet
from the night

Of history, where we lie dreaming still, he is wide
awake :

Weak, liable to ill-luck — yet rock where we are slight

Eddies, and amid us islands the spring tide be-
ginning to make.

Mark him, workers, and all who wish the world
aright —

He is what your sons will be, the road these times
must take.’

‘Why do we all, seeing a Communist, feel small?’ the
writer asks, and he goes on to explain that the ‘catspaw
ruffles our calm,’ and the ‘touch of storm brewing,
shiver the torches even in this vault.’

AIRMAN, POLITICS AND PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 253

My own feeling on reading this poem was that for
some reason the poet is afraid of Communists, and that
he wants to communicate this fear to the reader: but
that as long as he and the reader are afraid, they are in
no position to answer such questions. The poem has the
vice of puritanism: it establishes a strong sense of guilt
(the reader is guilty because he is not small like the
Communist catspaw; he is living in a vault; he holds him-
self too much in esteem; he is not building a new world);
then, after convincing the reader of his inferiority, it
seeks to convince him of a superstition: that the Com-
munist (who after all, though, is only mortal) is a rock,
is wide awake to the purpose of history.

This poem does not seem to me to compare with
other poems by Day Lewis, because a system of thought
predominates, and crushes out the spontaneous thought
and sympathy of the writer. If one looks at the poem
again one sees that even the Communist does not come
very well out of it: we are assured that he too is mortal,
weak, liable to ill-luck. The poem now seems to say
that he is really the same as we are, but is superior
in having submitted himself to this ideological system
which tells him what the future is going to be, and the
roads these times must take. In other words, it tells
him all sorts of things which he doesn’t really know,
and which the writer doesn’t know either, but which he
thinks he ought to know.

My argument is that as a man of action it may be
necessary to assume this knowledge, but that as an artist,
it is not only wrong, it is impossible to do so. It may be
necessary for the purposes of organization and confidence
that revolutionary workers should adopt a belief which
tells them quite positively certain things about the future.
But the point is that it is not really true that people

254 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

know these things, and it is the business of the artist
to know it is not true. If a little bird is paralysed with
conviction that in ten minutes’ time a very nice serpent
which has just looked his way is going to eat him, there
ought to be one minute centre of the bird’s consciousness
that is aware of a million other possibilities (however
much he wants to be eaten), and that centre is the artistic
consciousness. Day Lewis’s poem describes the attitudes of
the little bird and the serpent, but somehow the impersonal,
ultimately indifferent consciousness has got left out of it.

For ultimately, however interested the writer may be
as a person, as an artist he has got to be indifferent to
all but what is objectively true. The road the future will
tread may be the road of Communism, but the road of
the artist will always be some way infinitely more diffi-
cult than one which is laid down in front of him.

It seems likely, then, that the Communist explanation
of our society is not adequate to produce considerable
art: it is adequate only to use art to serve its own purposes.
The real objection to the Communist ideology in writing
is that it is not self-critical. All it demands from a writer
is that he should be a good and explicit exponent of
Communism: if he is that, it not only shields him from
criticism: there is positively no ground on which it can
criticize him. When Communists, in New Masses,
and International Literature, criticize proletarian litera-
ture, they are always safe when they can attack the writer
ideologically.^ If the writer is ideologically sound, they ex-
press the most naive surprise that his book is not readable,

^ The New Republic quotes a criticism of a book of pictures by
Soglow which begins : ‘Whether it is humor or not, depends entirely
on the class point of view. There is no such thing as humor in
general; humor is for one class or another. The question is whether
the book is satire for the working class or superficial cartoons to amuse
the well-to-do.’

AIRMAN, POLITICS AND PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 255

coupled with the most heartfelt hopes that the proletariat
will soon do better. They have no criterion or critical
apparatus by which to offer the most elementary explana-
tion of mere inefficiency. I imagine that to the perfect
Communist literary critic it must be a matter of almost
dumbfounded astonishment that a Chinese coolie who is
a member of the party, cannot write books far better
than the bourgeois propaganda of Shakespeare.

Thomas Mann, in his collection of critical essays,
Past Masters, suggests that ‘Karl Marx must read Fried-
rich Hblderlin.’ Perhaps another way of putting this
is to suggest that the Communist writer should read the
clinical discoveries of psycho-analysts, and that he should
respect, even if he does not accept, the conclusions of
Freud and Jung.

To take a very simple example, both psychology and
Communism offer explanations of the war. The Com-
munist explanation is familiar. We are told that imperi-
alist capitalism is a highly competitive system which is
bound to lead to war, when certain capitalist interests
are in one country threatened by their foreign rivals.
Moreover, war itself is an economic product of capitalism;
and that same capitalism, which is so nationalist in most
respects, is international when it serves the interests of
armament manufacturers, bankers and other monstrous-
scale crooks. In other words, under the capitalist system,
nationalism means commercial rivalry; internationalism
means war. Now war, of all the oppressive devices of
capitalism, is the most inimical to the workers, because
it is in no sense to the interest of the English worker
to kill the German or French worker, with whom, indeed,
he has interests in common. The psychological explana-
tion is not nearly so cut and dried as this, but it approaches;
the problem from an entirely different angle, regarding

256 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

primarily the mind of the individual or a collection of
individuals, and not the economic interests which direct
individuals as though they were merely cogs in an eco-
nomic machine. Psychologists regard war as an outbreak
of passions which are repressed by the ordinary conditions
of modern society. When Freud lectured in Vienna
during the war, he took this view of the war, referring to
aspects of it as examples of the kind of mass neurosis
which he had discovered in individual patients. The
subject has been discussed here in a book by Dr. Glover,
on PFar^ Sadism and Pacifism : and Aldous Huxley gave a
lecture on the wireless in which he quoted statistics to
prove that during the war there was a smaller proportion
of suicides in the countries of Europe, including the
neutral countries, than in peace time. It is no part of
my business to enter into this discussion now. All it is
necessary to show is that there is another, a psychological
explanation, of the war. Even if we believe Dr. Glover is
wrong, or that it is impossible to probe, in our present
state of ignorance, into the true psychological causes of
the war, the knowledge that such causes do exist, and
the view that war may be regarded as a disease of our
particular civilization, suggest a strong criticism of the
purely economic explanation, or the explanation in terms
of class war. What Dr. Glover goes on to say (as quoted
by Huxley in his talk) is that, after fifty years of re-
search, it might be possible to cure man of the desire
to express himself by fighting. This suggestion is, again,
a criticism of the technique of revolution, for it suggests
two questions, (i) Can you impose a cure on the capitalist
world by making a revolution? (2) Since revolution is
itself a form of fighting, does it not necessarily defeat
its own ends ?

Here, then, are two entirely different ways of looking

AIRMAN, POLITICS AND PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 257

at society. The one is that society is composed of a whole
divided vertically into different competing imperialist
units, which are divided again horizontally by class
differences. The other regards society as a collection of
individuals whose consciousness is a small light in the
vast field of the unconscious being. Whereas Com-
munism lays great emphasis on the will, psycho-analysis
doubts the blind will’s effectiveness, regards the will,
indeed, as dangerous and liable to destructive misuses,
and emphasizes the importance of patience and rational
understanding. Psycho-analysis may admit, in certain
circumstances, that class war exists, but it cannot accept
the assertion that the class of beings who are labelled
‘bourgeois’ or ‘capitalist’ or ''rentier are fundamentally
different from their neighbours, and only existing as
objects to be destroyed. Nevertheless, the ideals of a
classless society, and of an equal distribution of wealth,
both appeal to the psychologist. The great division of
Communism from all other creeds is that in it ends
have been made equivalent with means, the method has
deliberately been turned into the creed.

Now the political artist, the artist who wishes to write
about society as a whole, and not about the individual
severed from his background, is aware of these two ways
of thinking, the socialist and the psychological, which
greatly influence our modern political consciousness.

What happens if, instead of being a propagandist
for either point of view, he attempts a synthesis: an
understanding of the war, for example, which is in both
economic and psychological terms; or such an under-
standing of the post-war world ?

In the work of W. H. Auden one sees such a synthesis
attempted.

The world in which a great deal of Auden’s poetry

258 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

moves is that of the psychologist’s and doctor’s case book.
I have selected quite at random two quotations from an
article by A. E. Clark-Kennedy, on Acquired Disorders
of Function, in the Post-Graduate Medical Journal, to
illustrate the use of a language which is primarily jargon;

‘Loss of appetite, indigestion and sleeplessness serve
no useful purpose in sorrow, anxiety and fear.’

‘An acquired disorder of function may be recognized
by the fact that symptoms occur as an immediate conse-
quence in the change of external environment, such as
the presence of a horse, or the advent of the pollen season.’

A great deal of the imagery in Auden’s poetry has the
same kind of clinical significance as the images suggested
by such a phrase as ‘the presence of a horse and the
advent of the pollen season,’ in Clark-Kennedy’s account
of environments producing symptoms of hay-fever. For
this reason, Auden’s imagery has the immediacy of
imagery recollected in dreams, and the vividness of certain
types of neurotic behaviour:

‘Sir, no man’s enemy, forgiving all
But will his negative inversion, be prodigal :

Send to us power and light, a sovereign touch
Curing the intolerable neural itch,

The exhaustion of weaning, the liar’s quinsy,

And the distortions of ingrown virginity.

Prohibit sharply the rehearsed response
And gradually correct the coward’s stance;

Cover in time with beams those in retreat
That, spotted, they turn though the reverse were great;
Publish each healer that in city lives
Or country houses at the end of drives;

Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at
New styles of architecture, a change of heart.’

AIRMAN, POLITICS AND PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 259

When he writes such a line as ‘rise in the wind, my
great big serpent,’ one is aware that the sexual imagery
is conscious. The consciousness of imagery affects all
his poetry. In the same way as Jean Cocteau in his
Orphie renewed the imagery for death, supplying death
with a surgeon’s gloves and all the apparatus of the
operating theatre, so Auden has renewed the whole stock
of his poetic imagery. To do this, he has not only in-
vented; he has also plagiarized on a heroic scale. He
has ransacked Jazz songs (such as Cole Porter’s Let's
fall in love^' or Gershwin’s 'My one and only'\ psycho-
logical and medical text-books, and films, for his material.
His material is not, of course, these things in themselves,
but the minds of the people who are affected by them.

A verse like :

‘You were a great Cunarder, I
Was only a fishing smack.

Once you passed across my bows.

And of course you did not look back.

It was only a single moment, yet
I watch the sea and sigh
Because my heart can never forget
The day you passed me by,’

is an extension of the method used by Joyce in Ulysses
when he makes Bloom think in journalese (complete
with headlines), during the scene in the newspaper office.
But in these lines Auden has taken the method a stage
further than Joyce: for not only is the chorus satiric,
and a parody, but it has a third quite unexpected element
of seriousness in it: a true emotional, but rather pathetic,
content which makes one reflect that it is a transcription,
in contemporary imagery, of a genuine love lyric of a
simple ballad kind.

26 o in defence of A POLITICAL SUBJECT

On the one hand, then, there is this psychological
aspect of Auden’s poetry. To put this in the simplest
terms, he is here engaged in extending the tradition of
English poetry to his vast new clinical subject-matter.
But, primarily, the emotions are, in his work, presented
in simplified terms. For that reason he has gone back
to early English poetry, to plays like Everyman, and to
the Anglo-Saxon sagas, for his tradition. The Anglo-
Saxon influence is shown in the definitions of the Air-
man's Alphabet — for example :

‘wireless: sender of signal

and speaker of sorrow
and news from nowhere.
zero: Love before leaving
and touch of terror
and time of attack.’

Again, this influence is shown when he turns to a
simplified presentation of experience, of love or death.

‘To-night the many come to mind
Sent forward in the thaw with anxious marrow
For such might now return with a bleak face.

An image pause half-lighted in the door,

A greater but not fortunate in all.’

Or, again, from the last chorus from the same charade.
Paid on Both Sides:

‘His fields are used up where the moles visit.

The contours worn flat; if there show
Passage for water he will miss it :

Give up his breath, his woman, his team;

No life to touch, though later there be
Big fruit, eagles above the stream.’

AIRMAN, POLITICS AND PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 261

This also recalls the last chorus of Yeats’s version of
Sophocles’ CEdipus Rex:

‘Make way for CEdipus. All people said,

“That is a fortunate man’’;

And now what storms are beating on his head!

Call no man fortunate that is not dead.

The dead are free from pain.’

In such lines as those from the charade, Auden is
not merely expressing a desire to escape from the present
into archaic forms of experience: he is asserting the
memory of actual racial experiences, in the unconscious
mind. His poems are full of such references to racial
memory as:

‘Shall memory restore
The steps and the shore.

The face and the meeting-place;

Shall the bird live,

Shall the fish dive.

And sheep obey
In a sheep’s way;

Can love remember

The question and the answer.

For love recover

What has been dark and rich and warm all over?’

The symbols here are not I'terary: they are symbols
of a deeper state of consciousness, still existing in the
unconscious mind. This is a primitive consciousness,
not a literary consciousness, which Eliot appeals to in
lines like:

262 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

‘Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end.’

Auden’s poetry is made complex, because not only is
this analytic account of the collective unconscious pre-
sented in his poetry, but, after that, there is a further
problem of presentation : a political view of our society
is also presented. In the early poems, this view of our
civilization seems to owe much to The Waste hand.
In many of the poems there are pictures of a civilization
in decay:

‘Financier, leaving your little room
Where the money is made, but not spent.

You’ll need your typist and your boy no more;

The game is up for you and for the others.

Who, thinking, pace in slippers on the lawns
Of college Quad or Cathedral Close,

Who are born nurses, who live in shorts.

Sleeping with people and playing fives. . . .

You cannot be away, then, no

Not though you pack to leave within an hour,

Escaping humming down arterial roads :

The date was yours; the prey to fugues.

AIRMAN, POLITICS AND PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 263

Irregular breathing and alternative ascendancies
After some haunted migratory years
To disintegrate on an instant in the explosion of
mania

Or lapse for ever into a classic fatigue.’

But the mood differs from that of The Waste Land.
It is not despairing: on the contrary, it is almost impatient:

‘You whom I gladly walk with, touch,

Or wait for as one certain of good,

We know it, we know that love

Needs more than the admiring excitement of union.

More than the abrupt self-confident farewell,

The heel on the finishing blade of grass.

The self-confidence of the falling root.

Needs death, death of the grain, our death.

Death of the old gang.’

Or again :

‘Drop those priggish ways for ever, stop behaving
like a stone:

Throw the bath-chairs right away, and learn to
leave ourselves alone.

If we really want to live, we’d better start at once
to try;

If we don’t, it doesn’t matter, but we’d better start
to die.’

The writer still believes then, in these earlier poems,
that it is possible for the individual to save himself by
learning to love, and to live.

This belief is linked up with a theory of the psycho-

264 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

logical nature of illness. Auden’s poetry is full of refer-
ences to illness, to nurses, to people who are wheeled
about in bath-chairs; these illnesses are always interpreted
as symptoms of a state of mind:

‘For to be held for friend
By an undeveloped mind
To be joke for children is
Death’s happiness:

Whose anecdotes betray
His favourite colour as blue
Colour of distant bells
And boys’ overalls.

His tales of the bad lands
Disturb the sewing hands;

Hard to be superior
On parting nausea;

To accept the cushions from
Women against martyrdom.

Yet applauding the circuits
Of racing cyclists.’

To realize how important is this view of illness in his
poetry, it is necessary to examine The Orators^ where the
view of illness as a psychological defect, and the view of
a certain class of people as psychologically ill, are both
expressed. The subject is announced in the question:
‘What do you think about England, this country of ours,
where nobody is well V

Those sections of The Orators called Letter to a
Wound and The Airman's journal are in some ways
comparable to Rilke’s Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge.
It is hardly necessary to point out that Rilke’s Notebook

AIRMAN, POLITICS AND PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 265

is largely autobiographical, and that where it is fictitious
it creates, as does The Airman's ’Journal^ a personal legend.
Rilke shared Auden’s view of the psychological nature
of illness. The views of both writers is, to summarize it
crudely, that illness of the body is the physical expression
of a defect of the mind: thus it is to be regarded with
relief as a recognizable symptom, or even in some cases
with gratitude as an effective cure, or as a means by which,
through treatment of the body, a complicated illness of
the mind may be relieved.

Rilke— or Brigge— describes himself as suffering from
an illness all the symptoms of which are purely mental,
and yet it is an illness for the cure of which he goes to
the ordinary Paris hospital.

‘And now this malady, which has always affected me
so strangely. I am sure its importance is minimized, just
as the importance of other diseases is exaggerated. This
disease has no particular characteristics; it takes on those
of the person it attacks. With a somnambulic assurance
it drags from the profoundest depths of each one’s being
a danger that seemed past, and sets it before him again,
quite near, imminent. Men, who once in their school-
days attempted the helpless vice that has for its duped
partner the poor, hard hands of boys, find themselves
tempted afresh by it; or an illness they had conquered in
childhood recurs in them; or a lost habit reappears, a
certain hesitating turn of the head that had been peculiar
to them years before.’^

This illness is certainly a relative— a poor relative— of
the illness in the Letter to a Wound.

Rilke’s Journal and his poetry are preoccupied with
death. His view of death corresponds to his — and

The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, translated by John Linton
(Hogarth Press), "p. 59.

266 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

Auden’s— view of illness: ‘Formerly we knew (or per-
haps we just guessed) that we carried our death within
us, as a fruit bears its kernel. Children had a little death
within them, older people a large one. Women had
theirs in their womb, men theirs in their breast. One
had it, and that gave one a singular dignity, a quiet
pride.’ He contrasts the death of people now with those
earlier deaths: ‘The desire to have a death of one’s own
is growing more and more rare. In a little while it will
be as rare as a life of one’s own. Heavens! it is all there.
We come and find a life ready for us: we have only
to put it on. We go when we wish or when we are com-
pelled to. Above all, no effort. Voila votre mart, monsieur.
We die as best we can; we die the death which belongs
to the disease from which we suffer (for since we have
come to know all diseases, we know, too, that the different
lethal endings belong to the diseases and not to the people;
and the sick person has, so to speak, nothing to do).’

So that the death-in-life also results in the mechanism
of life-in-death, and deprives even death of reality. This
picture of a world of nurses (so like the world of James’s
last novel. The Ivory Tower), doctors, and sanatoria,
corresponds to Auden’s vision of the modern world.

‘ “Save me!’’ the voice commanded, but as I paused
hesitant

A troop rushed forward

Of all the healers, granny in mittens, the Mop,
the white surgeon.’

Corresponding to Rilke’s preoccupation with death
was his immense interest in re-creating in himself the
conditions of his childhood : in returning as far as possible
to the state in which he was, as a child. This was not

AIRMAN, POLITICS AND PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 267

Peter Pannishness, it was not a narcissistic desire to
recover lost charms and innocence and lack of responsi-
bility. On the contrary, it expressed rather the desire
we find in Yeats to create a legend, and the desire we
find in Eliot to recover a tradition. In the Notebook
the legend and the tradition to some extent overlap,
because he invents ancestors and family history. Never-
theless, the tradition was undoubtedly very real to him,
since he himself came of a partly aristocratic family: and
what is more natural than it should be immersed in
legend — even if the legend was deliberately exploited
from memories of childhood

Rilke’s family memories correspond to the airman’s
worship of his dead uncle in The Airman's Journal. This
tradition is linked up, too, with the airman’s childhood:

‘He (my uncle) didn’t come very often, but I can
remember when I was about thirteen a letter from him
coming at breakfast. “Of course, I know he’s very clever,’’
my mother sniffed, and then there was silence.

‘It wasn’t till I was sixteen and a half that he invited
me to his flat. We had champagne for dinner. When I
left I knew who and what he was — my real ancestor.’

Rilke, in his journal — like all the great aesthetes: like
Joyce, and Henry James, and the early Yeats— is occupied
in his art with the problems of individuals. The aesthetic
fulfilment of the individual soul is what occupies him,
as apart from the personal salvation which concerns Eliot,
or the personal damnation of Baudelaire. In Auden’s
work the emphasis is quite different: the interest is the
relation of the individual to society, the individual who
is not anti-social and a secret rebel, an anarchist, in the
sense in which all the great aesthetes have been so, bu^
who, if he is a rebel, is only that in conjunction witk^
social class.

268 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

Therefore the main interest of The Airman's yournal
is how the airman is able to relate himself to society,
and how far he is himself simply a product of the social
life which has produced him.

The symbolic position of the airman is, as it were,
to be on the margin of civilization. Being an airman,
it is obvious that he is not tied down in any way; he is
up in the air, and in the position of artists like Rilke or
Lawrence who travel; and yet he is the man of action,
flying, planning Fascist (.^) coups, circulating leaflets.

It is important to realize that this particular airman is
not only an airman with an aeroplane, but he is a psycho-
logical airman as well. He has another mythology besides
the ancestral relationship with his uncle. This mythology
has to do with the association, amongst certain natives,
of epilepsy with the idea of flying. Perhaps the airman
is an epileptic: certainly he is homosexual, and also
a kleptomaniac. The ’Journal leaves one in no doubt
that his uncle was homosexual, and on this fact depends
the ancestor relationship.

The airman symbolizes the homosexual, because, like
him, he is incapable of exploiting the old, fixed relation-
ships: he has involuntarily broken away from the mould
of the past and is compelled to experiment in new forms;
his life, being comparatively disinterested, may result in
an experiment of value to society, so long as he does not
become obsessed with his own personal problem. His
chief danger is his remarkable irresponsibility which
leads him to indulge in Fascist day-dreams of fantastic
and murderous practical jokes. The airman, therefore,
with his bird’s-eye view of society, sees everywhere the
enemy. The most brilliant passages in the book are
those in which he classifies the enemy.

We are never, of course, told directly who the enemy

AIRMAN, POLITICS AND PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 269

is, but only (i) how he behaves; (ii) symptoms by which
we may recognize his influence on individuals; (iii) how,
regarding him as a disease, we may recognize his symp-
toms in ourselves.

The study of his behaviour is very largely an ingenious
application of the Marxist analysis of capitalist society.
E.g.’. ‘The effect of the enemy is to introduce inert
velocities into the system (called by him laws or habits)
interfering with organization. These can only be removed
by friction (war). Hence the enemy’s interest in peace
societies.’

This is a brilliant but partial application of the Marxian
conception of history. But it is not a formula. It is a
generalization which is also a very striking psychological
observation of behaviour.

Combined with Marxism is psychology, and a very
acute analysis of the behaviour of individuals. The
‘enemy’ sections are the strength and also the weakness
of the yournal. They are strong because they contain the
same true vision as does the wider, social observation.
The weakness is, firstly, that the enemy tends to be too
easily recognizable as one of several public school types.
Secondly, that, in this context, psychology combined
with Marxism tends to produce a peculiarly ingenious
form of heresy-hunting. Heresy-hunting is not dangerous
because one wishes in any way to spare the Enemy,
but because it justifies narrow personal dislikes, univer-
salizes petty criticism, and because in many cases it
encourages a kind of masochistic self-abuse.

To say that the enemy is a public school type is
perhaps too strong; but at any rate he is recognizably a
member of the upper class.

‘Three kinds of enemy walk— the grandiose stunt —
the melancholic stagger — the paranoic sidle.

270 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

‘Three kinds of enemy bearing — the condor stoop —
the toad stupor — the robin’s stance.

“Three kinds of enemy face — the June bride— the
favourite puss— the stone in the rain,’

These are excellent descriptions of the kind of people
whose pictures we see in society newspapers. One reads
through another dozen or so, and one does not find one
paragraph which would apply nearly so effectively to a
member of the working class. One expects, therefore,
that since the airman is out to defeat the enemy, he will
find an ally among the class exploited by him. But not
a bit of it. All the airman has is one or two people whom
he can respect, Derek, a girl called E.

‘But are there not after all some houses to which all this
does not apply.? Cases of immunity, queer to research,
but quite authentic,?

‘Here a home, rather than name which the enemy will
employ any circumlocution; there a figure he will cross
the street to avoid, assume an interest in a barber’s
window rather than meet that incorruptible eye. The
Hollies, for instance, their most intrepid would steer
clear of though disobeying the most urgent order. So
far I have said nothing to E.’

So really we are back at the position of saying that
just a few people whom we approve of are ‘our set.’ We
have read through all the enemy characteristics, and they
don’t apply to our friends: or not seriously. We are with
Rimbaud in hating bourgeois morality: if we had been
young men twenty years ago perhaps we would have
volunteered to go out to Mexico with D. H. Lawrence,
and start a little colony; but it is too late for that now.
We are the intelligent.

The weakness of the enemy captions is that they
apply to the people whom one doesn’t like. One’s own

AIRMAN, POLITICS AND PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 271

little set draws closer together, only occasionally uniting
to hound out one of their number whom the others
recognize as the enemy.

But Auden is not quite so simple as that (not so simple
and abusive as Ezra Pound in his Cantos, for instance),
because :

(iii) there are the enemy symptoms in ourselves:

‘Three warnings of enemy attack — depression in the
mornings— -rheumatic twinges— blips on the face.

‘Three symptoms in convalescence— nail-biting— night-
mares — short sight.

‘Three results of an enemy victory — impotence —
cancer— paralysis.’

Some of the definitions of enemy activities also have
the same uncomplacent note of self-criticism :

‘Of the enemy’s definitions by Negation:

'Unless you do well you will not be loved.

‘I’m afraid of death (instead of / want to live).

‘Pleasure is the decrease of pain (olives— whisky).’

The airman’s means of attack is the practical joke
organized on a gigantic scale. The end of Kxsyournal is
full of such fantasies : ‘At the pre-arranged zero hour the
widow bent into a hoop with arthritis gives the signal
for attack by unbending on the steps of St. Philip’s. A
preliminary bombardment by obscene telephone messages
destroys the morale already weakened by predictions of
defeat made by wireless-controlled crows and card-packs.
Shock troops equipped with wire-cutters, spanners and
stink-bombs, penetrating the houses by infiltration,
silence all alarm-clocks, screw down the bathroom taps,
and remove plugs and paper from the lavatories.’

The principle of the airman is, of course, to shock,
although his methods are also partly a satire on estab-
lished Fascist methods : it is an extension of Rimbaud’s

272 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

mockery of everything bourgeois. The airman believes,
as Rimbaud believed, and as Shaw as a young man
believed, that a shock organized on a sufficiently large
scale will upset the private mental associations of the
enemy, and thus destroy his belief in himself. ‘Practical
jokes are in every sense contradictory and public, e.g. my
bogus lecture to the London Truss Club.’

After indulging in fantastic dreams of violence, the
airman suddenly goes back on these Fascist plans. ‘My
whole life has been mistaken, progressively more and
more complicated, instead of finally simple.’

He decides that violence is wrong because :

‘(i) The power of the enemy is a function of our
resistance, therefore

‘(2) the only efficient way to destroy it — self-destruc-
tion, the sacrifice of all resistance, reducing him to
the state of a man trying to walk on a frictionless
surface.

‘(3) Conquest can only proceed by absorption of, i.e.^
infection by, the conquered. The true significance of my
hands. “Do not imagine that you, no more than any
other conqueror, escape the mark of grossness.’’ They
stole to force a hearing.’

The airman’s end is now not far off. The last entry
in hisyournal is that his ‘hands are in perfect order.’ So
he has triumphed; but it is a secret victory. We have
seen him torn between ideals of revolution, ideas of
religion, and ideas of cure. The acceptance of his hands,
which is followed by the hands being in perfect order,
is his psychological victory.

The airman, being who he is, is bound to fail, because
he is alone. So long as he is alone he is bound, like
pacifists, to answer war by non-resistance of a kind
which he believes to be anti-toxin. That is, as long as

AIRMAN, POLITICS AND PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 273

the airman’s observations, whilst they make an enemy
of the governing class, do not find an ally in any other
class. There is never any really revolutionary issue in
The Airman's Journal, because the airman has no
friends.

The airman is particularly interesting because he is,
in fact, in much the same position as the contemporary
writer who hates the social system under which he exists,
and lives, and writes in a dream of violence on behalf of
himself and his friends. He is ignored by the greatest
part of society, and neither directly nor indirectly does
his work penetrate to it. Yet he may represent the most
intelligent and critical forces in society. Supposing that
he is living in a society that is self-destructive and
actively preparing for war, he seems to be completely
powerless. His elimination is no loss to society, as Fascist
governments have discovered who have been able to
dispose of all the groups representing culture in their
countries, because this culture had no deep roots in the
life of the whole people. The airman and the artist is,
like Roderick Hudson, just dangerously and acutely
himself, apart from the rest of the world, isolated in
his sensibility. Yet without him civilization is only a
name.

He has, therefore, like the airman, got to defeat the
enemy. There are two methods of attack. The first is
to become an active political agent, to take part in the
immense practical joke of destruction. But then he is
using the enemy’s own weapons: he will become an
enemy to the enemy; and, besides that, his hands steal.
The second is to learn how he may escape from his own
isolation; not to resist the enemy, but to absorb him.
To make an art that is infected by — that is about —
society, and which it is impossible for society to discard.

274 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

because it is essentially a part of it; and to make it a
part which will transform the whole.

One sees then in The Orators, the victory of the idea
of a psychological cure, which is always predominant as
an aspect of Auden’s work. But this is followed in The
Dance of Death by a violent swing-over to the other,
the revolutionary, idea. The theme of this play is
stated in the prologue, which is made by an Announcer:
‘We present to you this evening a picture of the de-
cline of a class, of how its members dream of a new
life, but secretly desire the old, for there is death inside
them. We show you that death as a dancer.’ The chorus
then murmurs, from behind the curtain, ‘Our death.’
The chorus belongs to the same class as that satirized
in The Orators. These people are shown in various
ridiculous attitudes— sun-bathing, turning Fascist, in
night clubs, abandoning their young women, engaged in
flight from the alone to the Alone; trying always to keep
the dancer, who represents their death, alive. The class
is the propertied class, who reply, to the suggestion that
they should become Communist, with Fascism :

‘audience: One, two, three, four.

The last war was a bosses’ war.

Five, six, seven, eight.

Rise and make a workers’ state.

Nine, ten, eleven, twelve.

Seize the factories and run them yourself.

B. : It’s ’is fault. I told you so.

AUDIENCE [j>ointing at dancer]:

Put him out. Put him out.
chorus: You are responsible
You are impossible.

Out you go.

AIRMAN, POLITICS AND PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 275

We will liquidate,

The capitalist state
Overthrow.
audience: Atta boys.
manager: Do something, man,

As quick as you can.

Prevent such behaviour
And be our saviour.

Get us out of this trouble
As I guarantee
My theatre will double
Your salary.

[dancer dances as the demagogue, the chorus lose
their menacing attitude and become fascinated.

Having refused to accept the Communist solution, the
Dancer dies, but not before he has made his will :

‘He leaves his body, he leaves his wife.

He leaves the years, he leaves the life,

For the power and the glory of his kingdom they
must pass.

To work their will among the working class.’

The play closes to a dead march, with Karl Marx
pronouncing that ‘The instruments of production have
been too much for him. He is liquidated.’

The position of this play then is complementary, but
not contradictory, to The Orators. What the play does
is not to make a propagandist assertion, but to state a
situation. The statement is not irreconcilable with the
position of The Orators. Each book states, as it were, a
hypothesis, and the two hypotheses enable the writer
to achieve his picture of the whole contemporary scene.
If one asks at what point that synthesis is achieved, I

276 IN DEFENCE OF A POLITICAL SUBJECT

think the answer is that it rests in a loving attitude of
mind: the writer does not write from hatred, not even
when he writes satire, but from a loving understanding.
His gift is the peculiar gift of a writer who does not
write from rejecting his experiences, nor from strict
selection amongst many appearances, but accepting more
and more of life and of ideas as he goes on experiencing.
His danger is that sometimes he adopts the too facile
formula of regarding all the world as ill, so that he expresses
a philosophy as soothing as that of a nurse. The peculiar
kind of experience which his poetry offers is an organic,
living experience, made up sometimes of contradictions,
and which is sometimes irresponsible and evasive. It is
a mistake to suppose his poetry is primarily one of
ideas: it is a chameleon poetry which changes its colour
with the ideas which it is set against; but the life is in the
chameleon, in the poetry itself, not in the ideas which are
seen through it. It is a poetry of life which deals in ideas,
but which is not ruled by them.

Sometimes Auden writes poems containing lines such
as these:

‘Language of moderation cannot hide
My sea is empty and the waves are rough :

Gone from the map the shore where childhood
played

Tight-fisted as a peasant, eating love;

Lost in my wake my archipelago.

Islands of self through which I sailed all day.
Planting a pirate’s flag, a generous bay;

And lost the way to action and to you.

Lost if I steer. Gale of desire may blow
Sailor and ship past the elusive reef.

AIRMAN, POLITICS AND PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 277

And I yet land to celebrate with you
Birth of a natural order and of love;

With you enjoy the untransfigured scene,

My father down the garden in his gaiters.

My mother at her bureau writing letters,

Free to our favours, all our titles gone.’

In such poetry one can see the opposing ideas fused
into one single idea, so that the contradictions of some of
the other poems disappear completely.

EPILOGUE

In this book I have tried to show that, apart from all
questions of tendency, there is, in our modern literature,
a consistent tradition of writing that has a political-moral
subject.

Essentially, James’s last novels, Eliot’s poems, Owen’s
poems, and Upward’s two short stories, present different
aspects of the same political subject.

The political subject has undergone transformations,
because at one time it seemed primarily the duty of the
individual to escape from his environment, and, with a
few others who cared about such things, to preserve, in
isolation, the values of our civilization. The impulse of
the character in James’s story, who cherishes her Altar
of the Dead, is the same as that of Lawrence when, in his
letters, he asks friends to emigrate with him in order to
found some settlement, where they would make the
beginning of a new life. The woman in James’s story had
her vision of the flaming altar which was the end of a
civilization; Lawrence had his vision of the plot of land
which was the beginning of a new one. What they both
cared for was civilization.

To other writers, as we see in The Waste Land, the only
reasonable act was to immerse themselves in ‘the destructive
element.’ The escape of the few offered no attractions.
The alternative to such an escape was to accept the fact
that our civilization is without faith, decaying, and in
some ways barbaric.

The third attitude is that of the man in Upward’s
story who desires a revolution to remove ‘the more obvious

278

EPILOGUE

279

material evils’ of the world. He clearly means much more
than this.

These attitudes all serve to present in lively and signifi-
cant ways the most serious subject possible to writing.

Beyond this indication of a common subject, a con-
sistent political tradition, there are certain conclusions to
be drawn.

The first is that the ‘tendency’ is always subsidiary to
the whole subject. The tendency at most is a selecting
instrument which directs the writer to a certain aspect
of the subject.

Tendencies in themselves are of no literary interest.

They are of no interest because art does not illustrate
a point of view, it does not illustrate at all, it presents
its subject in a new form.

Observation should be external and real. The thing
observed in a poem or a work of fiction should refer to
something outside the poem, in the same way as nature
poetry refers to a background of nature. Otherwise, it
is not observation, it is illustration.

Poetry is a language which can communicate simply
and directly experiences that are not directly communi-
cable in ordinary language. A single poem by Wilfred
Owen communicates, immediately and convincingly, ex-
periences that the reader may never have shared, and
which certainly are not communicated, although they
may be imagined by inferring them, in any other book
about the War. Further, poetry often communicates when
one does not fully understand it, and even when written
in a language which one knows very imperfectly.

The imagist poets seem to have thought that the
creation, in words, of a beautiful image was an end in
itself, as though the image had an existence of its own,
which was isolated from experience and the external world.

28 o in defence of A POLITICAL SUBJECT

But imagery is the urgent medium by which experience
holds our attention. A great part of the behaviour of
the most ordinary people is dictated by some image of
themselves which they hold in their minds. Everyone has
in his consciousness images of birth, death, sex, and every
kind of experience, but for the greater part of their lives
they are scarcely conscious of this imagery.

But the poet must be conscious of the profound
significance and meaning of imagery: his imagery must
be true. Images are not still-lifes to be hung on walls.
They are visions of the history of the race and of life and
death.

These are rough signs only. But they may help
to show that certain conclusions can be drawn, if we
accept the hypothesis that literature is a means of
understanding the profoundest and most moral changes
in the human mind.

INDEX

Aaron* s Rod^ 68, 179
Adam's Curse ^ 1 1 7
After Strange Gods^ 86, 153, 155,
167

Altar of the Dead, The, 28, 50, 32,
35, 36. 39, 41

Ambassadors, The, 26, 30, 32, 35,
36, 39» 4i» 53» 66, 67, 73,
75-83, 84, 86, 87, 1 14
American, The, 25, 28, 37, 39, 40,

42,45

American Scene, The, 66, 99
Apes of God, The, 200, 206, 207,
2 1 1 , sef,

Arnold, Matthew, 165-6
Artists in Uniform, 230
Aspern Papers, 45, 48, 53, 58
Auden, W. H,, 20; note, 148,
215, 236, 240, 257,

Auerbach, 232
Autobiographies, 119, 131
Aw heard Age, The, 26, 34, 48,
51, 57, 87, 213
AxePs Castle, 3 5

Backward Glance, A, 1 01
Balzac, H. de, 25, 191
Baudelaire, 72, 83, 104, 132, 134,

154, 155

Beast in the Jungle, The, 28
Beach, J. W., 37

Beethoven, 17, 53; Quartet in A
Minor, Op, 1 30, 95 ; Last
Quartets, 149, 150, 1 51
Birds, Beasts and Flowers, 160, 176,

183

Blackmur, R. P., 56, note

Blake, William, 162, 163
Blythdale Romance, The, 41
Blick ins Chaos, 140
Butler, Samuel, 162

Castle, The, 243-5
Celtic Element in Literature, The,
122

Celtic Twilight, The, 119, 122
Chekhov, 15, 174
Civilization and its Discontents,
146

Clark-Kennedy, A. E., 258
Colleagues, The {New Country), 242
Communism, 227-35, 254-6
Coxon Fund, The,

Curtius, Prof. Ernst Robert, 84

Dance of Death, The, 148, 274-67

Dante, 149, 154, 155

Daisy Miller, 47

Davies, W. H., 190

Dead, The, 113, 170

Decline of the West, The, 140

De Grey, 37

de la Mare, Walter, 1 3, 190
Dubliners, 170

Duchess of Malfi, The, 194, 196

Eastman, Max, 230
Eliot, T. S. —

Ash Wednesday, 149-52
Baudelaire, 132, 134, 140
Church, 157, 164-7, 172
Comparison with, 132-4
Gerontion, 141-2
Influences, 155

a8i

282

INDEX

Elioty T. S. — continued . —
Isolation, 135
Liberalism, 173-4
Morality, 162
Opinions, 166-7
Personality, 159
Poetry, 132-52
Prose, 153-75
Prufrock, 137-8
Subjectivism, 133, 134-6
Sweeney Agonistes, 147-8
The Waste Land ^ I4i"7
Tradition, 132, 153, 158-9, 16 1,
163, 164-5, 171

Fantasia of the Unconscious ^ 14
Farewell to Arms, A, 42, 205
Fascism, 167, 224
Faulkner, William, 42, 104, 205
Faust, 81

Figure in the Carpet, The, 51
Flaubert, 31, 191
Forster, E. M., 60
Frazer, Sir James, 146
Freud, 146

Garnett, Edward, 185
Glover, Dr., 256

Goethe, 23, 81, 115, 116, 160,
163, 172

Golden Bough, The, 146
Golden Bowl, The, 15, 24, 26, 27,
28, 31, 32, 35 » 37 , 52, 53,
58, 66, 67, 74, 75, 81, 82,
83, 85, 87, 95, 104, 114, 193
Green, Henry, 237
Green Helmet ^ Other Poems, The,
118

Gulliver's Travels, 2 1 3

Hardy, Thomas, 170
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 29, 40, 42
Hemingway, Ernest, 42, 205, 206

Hinkson, Katherine Tynan, 122,
123

Hollow Men, The, 128
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 173, 220
Hound and Horn, 3 5, 36, 56 note, 82
Howard's End, 60
Hulme, T. E., 154, 155
Huxley, Aldous, 185 note, 256

Ideas of Good and Evil, 122
In a Province, 237, 245-50
International Situation, The, 108
In the Cage, 48

Intimate Journals (of Baudelaire),
104, 134, 154
Invaders, The, 214-15, 237
Ivory Tower, The, 14, 54, 58, 61,
62, 66, 80, 99, 102, 104,
108, 199, 200

James, Henry —

Anecdotes about, 64-6
Attitude to death, 39-42
Attitude to sex, 34-7, 194-6
Drama, 57, 192
Method of presentation, 191
Money, 59 seg., 103
Morality, 66, 71-2, 89, 90, 196
Nouvelles, 48
Opinions, 63, 64, 198
Relation of life to art, 49 seg.
Sense of tradition, 29, 62
Snobbishness, 31, 19 1, 199
Symbols, 24

The Figure in the Carpet, 51-2
James, William, 26, 29, 49, 52, 65
Joyce, James, 12, 23, 80, 81, 86,
104, 113, 123, 132, 168, 170,
172, 173, 181, 191, 192, 209,
221

Kafka, Franz, 243 seq.

Kaverin, V., 234

Kharkov manifesto. The, 232, 233

INDEX 283

Lady Chatterlefs Lover ^ 183, 184
Last Poems ^ 220

Lawrence, D. H., 14, 15, 16, 17,
23f 3L 4o» 4 - 2 , 68, 104, 113,
123, 124, 144, 160, 163, 168,
170, 172, 173, 176, 186, 220,
225

Leavis, F. R., 13, 120
Le/t Review, 233
Lenin, 235

Lesson of the Master ^ The, 48
Lewis, Cecil Day, 226, 252, 253
Lewis, Wyndham, 82 note, 105,
176, 191, 200, 205-16
Literature of the Peoples of the
U.S.S.R,, 234 sef.

Living, 237

Madame de Mauve s, 32
Madonna of the Future, The, 29
Man Who Died, The, 16, 176, 182
Mann, Thomas, 2 56
Mansfield, Katherine, 168
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The,
162

Men without Art, 205 note, 207 note
Method of Henry James, The, yj
Milton, 201
Moby Dick, 174, 182
Moore, George, 121, 125

New Masses, 2 30, 2 3 3

Notes of a Son and Brother, 49, 65

Odyssey, The, 85, 211
Orators, The, 215, 240, 264-74
Owen, Wilfred, 130, 135, 217,
218, 219, 221, 279
Owen Wingrave, 113

Paradise Lost, 201
Passionate Pilgrim, The, 29
Past Masters, 255
Plomer, William, 214

Plumed Serpent, The, 16, 177, 183
Poetry and Tradition, 122
Poetry of Socialism, 234
Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, A, 84, 86

Portrait of a Lady, The, 39, 40, 55
Post, Laurens van der, 245, 250,
251

Pound, Ezra, 12, 16, 155, 1 91, 203
Praz, Mario, 206

Princess Casamassima, The, 34, 43,
45, 200

Principles of Literary Criticism, 12
Psycho-analysis, 257 seq.

Pupil, The, 34, 37, 45

Rapp {Russian Assn, of Proletarian
Writers), 230, 231
Reflections on the Death of a Por-
cupine, 176

Revenger's Tragedy, The, 141, 212
Richards, 1 . A., 12, 14, 144, 147,
189, 204, 222

Rilke, Rainer Maria, 132, 265 seq.
Rock, The, 152, 167
Roderick Hudson, 25, 26, 27, 30,
37, 38, 40, 43, 45
Romanov, 231
Romantic Agony, The, 206

Sacred Fount, The, 87
Sacred Wood, The, 157
Science and Poetry, 12,222
Science of Life, The, 202
Secret of the Golden Flower, The,
251

Selivcnovsky, A, 234
Sense of the Past, The, 53, 66, 80,
99, 105, 108, 113
Small Boy and Others, A, 25, 49,

65

Sons and Lovers, 178
Spengler, Oswald, 140

INDEX

284

Spoils of Poynton^ TAe^ 31, 34, 48,
56, 58, 62

Studies in American Classical Litera-
ture, 40

Sullivan, J. W. N., 151
Sunday, 237
Swift, 213
Symonds, J. A., 116

Temple, Mary, 65
Time and Western Man, 82 note,
10$

To the Lighthouse, 203
Tourneur, 141, 212
Tower, The, 121, 131
Tragic Muse, The, 45, 46, 47, 200
Turn of the Screw, The, 34, 35, 37,
48, 53, 108, 113, 114
Tynan, Katherine, see Hinkson

Ulysses, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 98,
104, 1 14, i8r, 203
Upward, Edward, 236, 237 seq,,
278

Use of Poetry and the Use of Criti-
cism, The, 163 note, 164 note

Verlaine, 143

Virgin and the Gipsy, The, 176
Voronsky, 235

War, Sadism and Pacifism, 256

Waste Land, The, 12, 14, 15, 17,
98, 1 16, 132, 133, 140,

141-7, 150, 155, 189, 190,
204, 262, 263, 278
Waves, The, 203
Webster, 198
West, Rebecca, 36
Westcott, Glenway, 36
West-Oestlicher Divan, 23, 1 1 5
Wharton, Edith, loi
What Maisie Knew, 24, 45, 48, 52
White Peacock, The, 176
Whitman, Walt, 160
Wilson, Edmund, 3 5
Wind among the Reeds, The, 125
Wings of a Dove, The, 15, 26, 27,
32, 35, 58, 59, 61,66, 67 seq,,
81, 83, 85, 88, 104
Women in Love, 1 1 3, 179
Woolf, Virginia, 203, 204
Work in Progress, 104

Yeats, W. B.—

Contemporaries, 119-20
Individuality, 115
Magic, 122-23, 127, 128
Morality, 128-31
Politics, 1 16
Realism, 120-1
Symbolism, 121, 123-6
Yellow Book, The, 49, 1 1 3, 1 19

2 ^ 1 insky, C., 234